March 5, 2011 – Mark's IT Blog

FIT5167 – Natural Computation Week 1

Natural computation for intelligent systems is a subject dedicated to the use of Neural Networks for the use of pattern recognition. Of the four subjects introductory lectures I found Natural Computation to be the most stressful. We were hit with a ‘self-assessment’ math test which we were advised would be the taste of the course. It has been a long time since I have done pure mathematics so was not completely comfortable with some topics covered.

Assuming that a great deal of pure mathematics will be required to do well in this subject it will likely be my most difficult this semester.

I have begun reading the prescribed text (S. Samarasinghe, Neural Networks for Applied Sciences and Engineering) however I still feel very foggy about a lot of the concepts raised and about neural networks in general.

The key advantages of neural networks appears to be the high degree of parallelism and the ability to ‘learn’.

Learning can be accomplished through supervised or unsupervised methods but these seem to always be decided by the application rather than the implementer.

This week I will get familiar with MatLab and hope to find some software that can emulate neural networks.

what is a neural network? what does it do? how does it work?

FIT5044 – Network Security Week 1

The first lecture for network security was presented by Dr. Phu Le. Materials for the subject will be published to: http://users.monash.edu/~pdle/cpe5002/l.html

Some interesting points were raised during the lecture:

100% secure networks are currently an untenable goal. The US gov’t is grappling with this issue at present: http://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/nsa-director-says-us-has-duty-secure-internet-090710
Numerous countries have developed large teams within their defense forces for cyber defense and offence.
At present banks and insurers are paying out millions of dollars every year to cover loses through cyber theft.
50% of security breeches go unreported
There is generally a mutual trade-off between security and speed/convenience.

This subject will focus on the software side of information security. As such, our assignments will revolve around cryptography, firewalls and security policies. Interestingly there is no exam for this subject.

Tutorials started this week also. I was a bit perplexed by the fact that our first tutorial was purely a linux tutorial. I think basic linux skills should be a pre-requisite for post graduate level IT studies! In any case I think I will find this subject very interesting as it is very deep and each of the topics we skim over are areas of research in themselves. For a practical exercise this week I will complete a tutorial on installing an SSL certificate in Apache. Something fairly common-place but none-the-less I have very little understanding of: http://www.digicert.com/ssl-certificate-installation-apache.htm