Creating the New Cybersecurity Pro; Interview with Cornell Computer Science Professor Fred Schneider

Samuel B. Eckert Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University Fred Schneider believes the future of the IT profession is handicapped by a shortage of academics to provide the training for needed IT security skills.

In an interview with GovInfoSecurity.com, Schneider contends that to produce not only the teachers, but the practitioners themselves, American universities need to create innovative graduate-level programs that provide training that encompasses not only an understanding of IT security technologies, but an understanding of why the technology is needed as well.

Schneider, also a member of the federal government's Information Security and Privacy Advisory Board and co-chair of Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing Academic Advisory Board, says

"In the longer term, when you make cybersecurity technology decisions, you want to make it within the context of things like knowing its effect on privacy, knowing whether the economics of the situation support the kinds of changes you are making and understanding about business models."

See full story and interview transcriptin GovInfoSecurity.com.

Academic: Wireless sensors can easily measure caloric intake

Shankar Sastry, Dean of Engineering at the University of California Berkeley, was recently interviewed along with Senior Director of Manhattan Research, Monica Levy, by the California Healthcare Foundation's iHealthBeat. Both Sastry and Levy discuss the current state and the promise of wireless-enabled healthcare tools.

“The cell phone is perfect because it’s like a wrist watch you carry around, I think the idea of having access to electronic medical records is transformational in that it changes electronic medical records to be personal health records,” Sastry said. ”So I think that going forward there will be a huge consumer push to be able to both record and analyze data and the cell phones are gradually becoming not just a place for repository and also for analyzing data, but also as a distributive sensor network in the sense that the cell phone can interrogate other sensors which are attached to your body.”

“It’s reasonably easy for us to measure the [caloric] in-take — the out-take has always been way, way difficult, partly because we have such different metabolic rates,” Sastry said. “But I do think with the sensing though you do get a handle on those metabolic rates. So That I think is huge: To be able to then get sense of how much you are burning up in addition to how much you are taking in.”

See more at mobilehealthnews.com.