News
Dr. Erik Fredericks Recognized for Contribution to Google Cloud's Faculty Summit
November 17, 2020
Computer Science faculty member Dr. Erik Fredericks recently participated in the Google Cloud (Virtual) Faculty Summit as a panelist in the “Google Cloud Undergraduate Curriculum and Student Projects” track. He joined many other faculty, practitioners, and Googlers (including Vint Cerf) in presenting his experiences in incorporating cloud techniques in the classroom, focusing on student projects.
Topics at the Google Cloud Symposium focused on how cloud resources could best be applied to the classroom at all levels of education, from grade school to post-graduate. Such topics included cloud certification programs, methods for developing and supporting hackathons, highlighting publicly-available datasets for artificial intelligence and machine learning projects, and how to use the many-available cloud resources for research. Of notable interest was Vint Cerf’s keynote that described the evolution of internet protocols, including future ideas for how to transmit web traffic between satellites within our galaxy.
Dr. Fredericks has been participating in the Google Cloud faculty program since 2015 and has leveraged it to bring cloud resources into class, enabling projects that are typically difficult to implement without the cloud. One notable class project has been to setup a worldwide load-balancing network for a web application, where students can create virtual machine images at Google data centers across the world. An interesting example of this project is to demonstrate a denial-of-service attack against a website being served from North America and seamlessly transition to one hosted in Europe.
Cloud resources will feature prominently in the upcoming CIS659 – Cloud Applications Development course, where students will receive hands-on experience with the many different facets of cloud applications.