Message From Leadership

Morgan Zantua, Executive Director

Honoring Black History Month

Last week I shared the CityU mission and value of providing opportunities to underrepresented adult populations to achieve their dream of life-long learning and advancing their career. I failed to acknowledge that February is Black History Month.   

I researched the contributions made by Black Scientists, engineers, mathematicians, chemists, and continued to target Black Innovators & Technologist aligned closely with the courses taught here at CityU. Take the time to familiarize yourself with the individuals who have contributed significantly to our lives today.   

For individuals who missed the movie, or haven’t read the book, Hidden Figures, (available through CityU’s library) I would like to acknowledge the contributions made by Mary Jackson, engineer and mathematician, Katherine Johnson, mathematician, and Dorothy Vaughan, mathematician. These Black women made significant contributions to the NASA SPACE program in the 1960s. I took time to fact-check the Hollywood movie hype compared to the actual events. While 85% of the events were accurate, certain events portrayed in the movie, were dramatized to create the Hollywood experience. Remember, the movie Hidden Figures was created in a way to draw in more viewers, so a level of artistic license was used. For instance, Kathrine Johnson did, in fact, hand calculate John Glenn orbital trajectory. However, it took three days to perform the actual calculations. Mary Jackson’s challenges were slightly altered to dramatize her situation. While Jackson never went to court to appeal for the right to attend night classes offered at a segregated white high school, she did have to receive special permission through a written application process. Hidden Figures – Jackson, Johnson, and Vaughan are just some examples of the integral contributions and patchwork that Black Americans have and continue to provide in the whole of American history.  

Black Americans are contributors to what makes CityU and STC an amazing educational experience. More diversity in technology means better technology for everyone. I would like to honor our Black faculty members for what they are doing to shape technology and share who they are with you. These leaders are shaping you, our future technology leaders.

Darron Johnson
MSCY, BSITM
Donna Hoffman
BSCS, MSCIS
Jasmine Jackson
MSCS
Patrick Offor, Ph.D.
(RET Army, CW)
James Taylor
MSIT, (Army RET CWII)
Bukasa Tshilombo
MSEE, MBA

Club Announcements

  • Cybersecurity Club
This week’s club meeting will Github basics! See all of you there and let us know if you have any questions! Click here to join.
  • STC Tech Club

STC Tech Club meets every Thursday from 4:30 PM to 5:30 PM (PDT) via Teams to provide tech-related learning opportunities, skill development, and networking. Students or faculty who would like to share your expertise or project, please contact Yang Ren. Click here to join.  Everyone is invited! 

Upcoming schedule:

     – Week 8: Invited Talk

          Morteza Sahebkar, Chief Technology Officer at HomeWAV 

          Title: Benefits of Cloud Computing in industry and best practices of Software Development 

     – Week 10: STC Applied Research Symposium

          Capstone project presentations

The STC Tech Club is proud to announce we are providing vouchers for 50% discounts on the AWS Cloud Practitioner certification exam. Please contact Yang Ren if interested.

  • Data Science Club

The Data Science Club would like to invite you to our weekly meetings on Wednesdays at 4pm PST. You can join our meetings using the link here or by scanning the QR code on the right. In addition to an Invited Talk, AI-900 Certification Workshop, and Research Symposium, we’ll be covering various topics this quarter including Feature Engineering, Data Visualization, and AI Ethics!SS

Opportunities

Check out the New Human Centered Artificial Intelligence (HCAI) Research Group 

Meeting Schedule:  Every Monday 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM PST – Join here 

For more information, click here

Upcoming Events

National Cyber League Spring 2022


CAE Forum: Mar 2, 2022

Presentation 1

Title/Topic: Workload Modeling for Privacy and Attack Detection in Databases

Time: 1:00 – 1:50 pm EST/ 10:00 10:50 am PST

Location: https://caecommunity.zoom.us/my/caeforum
Just log in as “Guest” and enter your name. No password required.

Click here for more info

Presentation 2

Title/Topic: Advertising Technology (AdTech)

Time: 2:00 – 2:50 pm EST / 11:00 – 11:50 am PST

Location: https://caecommunity.zoom.us/my/caeforum
Just log in as “Guest” and enter your name. No password required.

Click here for more info

Tech Humor