This paper describes the design and findings from a 15 week after-school program offered to middle-school students that covered a variety of computer science and engineering topics. Students in the program completed a short survey before and after the program conclusion that measured their sense of belonging, confidence, interest, and more in both fields. Throughout the program, students learned and applied skills in emerging areas in both computer science and engineering. Students then applied these skills to create a micro air-quality sensor that would allow their community to have a better understanding of their local air quality. Our initial quantitative results from the survey indicate little impact on the students. However, when examining the open questions from the students, it is more clear that there was indeed a positive impact with students. We also describe our experiences in providing the program and what changes we would make for future offerings.

As the use and application of Internet of Things (IoT) expands, the search for reliable, long-range, low-cost, and low-power communication between devices in order to provide real-time data is essential. Given these requirements, LoRa is a favorable choice for IoT devices that have a low-bandwidth requirement such as those used in sensing applications. However, the potential distance of LoRa can be misleading for projects that use popular boards and low-cost antenna options such as spring and simple copper wire antennas. In this paper, we investigate the potential distance using a variety of popular LoRa boards with different types of low-cost antennas. We provide an analysis using a variety of boards including a LoRa RFM9X board, LoRa RP2040 board, and a Raspberry Pi 3 with a LoRa HAT. We utilize a variety of antennas including a pigtail antenna, a directly soldered spring antenna, and a simple copper wire antenna including a dipole antenna. We hypothesized that the pigtail antenna would outperform the spring and simple copper wire antennae due to its higher cost. However, through a series of experiments conducted on our campus that test various distances and obstructions, our experiments reveal that in most cases the spring antenna yielded higher signal strength measured in RSSI. These results will benefit IoT enthusiasts, practitioners, and engineers to make informed decisions about the hardware they utilize, thereby enhancing the overall performance and reliability of LoRa-enabled devices in diverse environments.

Food waste and food insecurity are prevalent challenges on college campuses. Studies show that approximately 30-40% of students are food insecure while over 22 million pounds of food on college campuses is wasted. Food waste also contributes to global warming where methane is produced in landfills and has a higher global warming potential than carbon dioxide. Several technical solutions have been proposed to reduce both food waste and food insecurity, however, there has been less focus on solving this challenge within college campuses. In this work, we present Campus Plate, a platform that allows members of the campus community to quickly identify and retrieve excess food from dining services and campus events. We describe the technical implementation and the people and partnerships that were established to ensure Campus Plate was successfully implemented on our campus where in a short period, over one thousand food items have been retrieved. Through Campus Plate, we are able to reduce food waste and food insecurity and contribute to a more sustainable college campus.

This paper presents preliminary findings from a deployment of an Internet of Things (IoT) air quality sensor that can provide realtime and historical fine-grained air quality data. Current air quality data provided to communities may be inaccurate meaning that people are breathing air that is more polluted than what is reported. Through this research, we share our findings from testing in a controlled environment, a test deployment in an urban environment, and an enclosure for future deployments. From our test deployment we are able to determine that there is a significant difference between two locations that are less than 4 miles apart where the average particulate matter reading was more than double. These findings show that fine-grained air quality monitoring can provide the community with more meaningful data of the air they breathe.

With recent efforts promoting computer science through industry, academic, and governmental partnerships, access to computing in high school curriculum has increased. However, a majority of high schools still do not offer computer science. While in-school programs can provide more equitable access to computing, these types of programs are not available to every student. To supplement national efforts, our university created a community outreach organization to provide opportunities to the local community. The organization creates opportunities for middle and high school students to learn different topics in computing with the main goal of increasing confidence. The primary program we offer is a two-hour tech camp, which explores a particular topic in computing. In this poster, we look to discover how tech camps affect confidence in computing. We identify which age groups are most positively affected by tech camps as well as what topics are most effective. We also discuss our methods for gathering data, our analysis of data, and how our findings will be used in future programming.

Mobile applications are granted access to large amounts of data both stored and sensed on a user’s device. While the data stored on these devices can be protected with encryption, where the private keys are protected through a combination of biometric authentication and passcodes, it is important to consider the security of data in transit and the many connections applications make to different domains. Often, these domains are unknown to the user where they can include third-party domains and tracking services. In this paper, we investigate the current state of transport layer security (TLS) utilization across the top information sharing applications in the iOS App Store. Through this study, we are able to better understand which domains follow best practices and use recommended ciphers and TLS versions. We also provide deeper insight into the prominent use of tracking services and how they differ in their utilization of TLS. Our study utilizes a proxy service to detect the domains that applications communicate with and then uses OpenSSL to analyze the supported ciphers, TLS versions, and certificate details. We also leverage domain analysis from DuckDuckGo Tracker Radar to differentiate tracking domains. From this study, we analyzed 965 unique domains and found that 935 (96%) use a cipher that is not recommended and only 23 (2%) of the domains strictly followed recommendations on cipher and TLS utilization. While most domains are utilizing recommended versions of TLS and recommended ciphers, this study shows there are many that still support vulnerable versions of TLS and vulnerable ciphers, leaving the user’s data at risk.

Large scale efforts, such as CS4All and Hour of Code, have made significant progress in attracting more students to computing as well as attracting underrepresented groups. However, even with these large efforts, there is still work to be done to help increase diversity and ensure computing jobs are not left unfilled. The authors will present their experiences in creating a Community Outreach program known as CS+ at Baldwin Wallace University. They will share the model that was created for CS+ to ensure continuity and scalability in the program. Even with a small team, CS+ has made significant progress towards their mission in providing opportunities for students to learn computing that have limited access to similar programs. The poster will include organizational details of the group including recruitment of students, positions they hold, and the vision and mission of the program. The poster will also share experiences in partnering with teachers at local school districts, attracting students to the program, and partnering with the education department as well as community organizations. The poster will include sample content that is used in camps and clubs as well as a site where all of the content can be accessed. While our efforts alone may not have the same impact as large organizations, by inspiring other institutions to start similar programs, we can reach underrepresented groups and those that lack confidence in computing to help bridge the gap in diversity and meet the demand of computing jobs that are available.

This paper presents our experience implementing a newly designed introduction to computing course for first year undergraduate students. The redesigned course focuses on the use of Raspberry Pi microcomputers as a common computing platform in order to encourage student experimentation and fun in a relatively low-cost environment. The course we describe represents a departure at our university from a traditional first-semester introduction to computing which emphasized foundational technical and mathematical skills but less exploration of the field of computing in a more wholistic manner. Our new course focuses on exposure to computing through experimentation. Additionally, it emphasizes community building among the students as well as affording them the opportunity to bring their creativity to bear in a final project showcase. As a result, the course is proving to be attractive not just to traditional computing majors but to a wider swath of the university community. This paper describes the topics selected in the redesign of the course, a summary of the labs involved, a discussion of assignments, and a description of the final project process. We discuss feedback received from students and the overall perception of the course among students and faculty. We also reflect on our experiences from redesigning the course and provide advice for those wishing to adopt a similar introductory course.

In this paper, we present a security and privacy enhancement (SPE) framework for unmodified mobile operating systems. SPE introduces a new layer between the application and the operating system and does not require a device be jailbroken or utilize a custom operating system. We utilize an existing ontology designed for enforcing security and privacy policies on mobile devices to build a policy that is customizable. Based on this policy, SPE provides enhancements to native controls that currently exist on the platform for privacy and security sensitive components. SPE allows access to these components in a way that allows the framework to ensure the application is truthful in its declared intent and ensure that the user's policy is enforced. In our evaluation we verify the correctness of the framework and the computing impact on the device. Additionally, we discovered security and privacy issues in several open source applications by utilizing the SPE Framework. From our findings, if SPE is adopted by mobile operating systems producers, it would provide consumers and businesses the additional privacy and security controls they demand and allow users to be more aware of security and privacy issues with applications on their devices.

Mobile devices have experienced explosive growth and rapid adoption. These devices have also become troves of security and privacy data of the consumers that utilize them. What makes mobile devices unique from traditional computing platforms is the additional sensing components they contain and their ease of access which allow consumers to make these devices a part of their lives. Additionally these devices are fragmented in operating systems, sensing capabilities, and device manufacturers. In this paper we define an ontology that can be utilized as a foundation for enforcing security and privacy policies across all mobile devices, and use the ontology to define policies and to model knowledge elements for mobile devices. We also identify areas where the policies can be applied, including whether to enforce policies on the device or in the cloud.