On June 12, Professor Monisha Pulimood (Computer Science) and Professor Kim Pearson (Journalism) presented at a workshop on promoting collaborations between journalism and computer science students to foster computational thinking in the classroom and, later, the newsroom. The workshop, hosted by the Dow Jones News Fund at the Dow Jones Kilgore Campus in Princeton, NJ, was attended by twenty media and computer science college professors from across the mid-Atlantic region.
Professor Pulimood and Professor Pearson, along with Professor Diane Bates (project evaluator), shared the findings of their NSF grant-funded project in a presentation entitled “Collaborating Across Boundaries: Preparing Students for the New Newsroom”. Prof. Pulimood and Prof. Pearson led participants through hands-on activities designed to share tools and pedagogy for bringing computational thinking to the classroom.
For more information on the Dow Jones workshop, see News Fund’s article: https://www.newsfund.org/uploads/CabectWorkshop509.htm
For information on Dr. Pulimood and Dr. Pearson’s CABECT project, see: http://pulimood.pages.tcnj.edu/research/cabect/
This project presents an approach to web application security that modifies general penetration testing tools to test for advanced vulnerabilities. As a proof of concept, the ZAP (Zed Attack Proxy) security tool was extended with functionality to test vulnerabilities such as server-side security misconfiguration, to test CABECTPortal (a website housing collaborations between multiple disciplines). By combining the general vulnerability checks built into tools like ZAP and the server-side maintenance checks that are normally conducted manually by system administrators and programmers, this project provides a more tailored approach to security testing that can be applied to any web application, making testing easier and more precise.