Research Reality: Research projects can include multiple collaborators, generate large amounts of data, include hundreds or thousands of participants/samples, and require significant computing resources for data storage, transfer, and analysis. The data needs to be shared, combined, and manipulated by researchers who may sit on the other side of a wall, across campus, or across the ocean from each other.
Welcome back, everybody! Pittsburgh may be cold and gray, but you’re still living on the holiday high! You’re all stocked up, your belly is filled with cookies, you spent lots of time with friends and family, and you can’t help but look at the world through joy-filled eyes. Hopefully, that’ll carry you through the semester, or at least until spring break.
If you’re lucky enough to have scored some new smart devices, get them set up on Residence Hall Wi-Fi (MyResNet) to ease your transition back to campus.
Will you be travelling internationally on university business during the spring term? Going overseas raises a lot of technology questions. What adapters will I need? What devices should I bring? What should I do if they get lost or stolen? How do I protect my data?
As a kid, winter break was chock-full of fun and freedom. Whether you were playing for hours in the snow, reading the new Junie B. Jones book you got from the Scholastic book fair, or watching movie marathons, the world was your oyster in those sacred two weeks. A lot has changed since then—mostly the fact that now, normal life still looms large.
When it comes to diversity and inclusion, the use of technology may not be the first thing that comes to mind. However, with the help of their Director of Information Technology and Networking Kim Getz, Pitt's School of Law found an innovative way to leverage Pitt Information Technology's Lecture Capture (Panopto) service to meet the needs of their students and faculty.
Any time, from anywhere, on any device, with anyone—that’s the name of the game nowadays. Whether you’re flying high on three cans of Red Bull trying to finish a group project in Hillman, uploading hours of B-roll for a film project, or working with a colleague who sits across campus, cloud computing is essential to the everyday work environment.
August 6:
Dear diary … If a ghost haunts an empty residence hall, is it really haunted? All the students are gone; only the guys putting in the new Wi-Fi stuff are here, but they’d don’t even sleep over. At night, I roam the bowels of the Schenley Quad alone. I float above the Towers and gaze out at the campus, thinking of decades gone by.
Movies romanticize disguise. Your favorite heroes slip into crowds undetected, use fake IDs and fingerprints to sneak into secret lairs, and get custom passports under unique aliases. I grew up with iconic 2000s children’s spy cinema like Spy Kids and Agent Cody Banks. These movies made me skeptical of strangers in public, and also made me really want a microwave that could make burgers out of space food.
Three years ago, my grandma asked me to check her inbox and tell me if her emails were legit. A quick glance revealed an inbox chock-full of crazy phishing schemes. From ransom threats to sketchy requests to wire millions of dollars, the scams seemed pretty obvious.
Recently, my parents clicked a link from “AT&T” to confirm their account information, which allowed a hacker to break into their account, change the password, and buy $3,000 worth of devices. Luckily, they were able to recover the account, but that was close … way too close.
The world is changing rapidly. As professional environments become increasingly flexible, more and more employees are able to work remotely from home and other locations. You may find yourself doing some work in the evening, performing your job off-site one or more days a week, or even having an entirely remote position. While riding the information superhighway of the new workplace, it’s important to make sure that unwanted hitchhikers aren’t tagging along with you.