UoM Miami, UTech Jamaica Sign MoU For Research and Internship in ICT

From left, Prof. M. Brian Blake, Dean of the Graduate School,
University of Miami, Mr. Julian Jarrett,  Assistant Lecturer,
School of Computing and Information Technology UTech and
Dr. Sean Thorpe, Director of Graduate Studies, SCIT, UTech

The School of Computing and Information Technology at the University of Technology, Jamaica (UTech) as part of its thrust to build on its published cutting-edge research in ICT and to enhance interaction and sharing of knowledge with international scholar communities has strengthened its partnership with the Graduate School, at the University of Miami (UoM).

The two Universities have entered into an internship Affiliation Agreement that will among other things, over the next three years, enable research internships and student and faculty exchanges aimed at improving existing technical computer science and research skills as well as promote cultural diversity among the participants.

Dr. Sean Thorpe, Programme Director of Graduate Studies, School of Computing and Information Technology (SCIT), UTech and UTech’s first PhD graduate who was this year awarded the doctoral degree in Cloud Computing Forensics and Security, has been instrumental in forging the collaborative arrangements between UTech and UoM.

Dr. Thorpe notes that “the long term prospect of these research internships is to develop joint doctoral degree programmes in Computer Science and Information Systems at UTech.” Dr. Thorpe explains that the expected outcome of this internship project is the “development of a mobile crowd sourcing application that runs as a data cloud network service with sustainable intelligent mechanisms built into this application.

The experimental results of this project will be published in a high quality journal or conference within the Association of Computing Machinery(ACM) or Institute of Electronic Engineers (IEEE) proceeding.” This work is particularly important at this time as the use of mobile social media has become pervasive. The ability to use the mobile phone to detect patterns in large volumes of data (crowds of “big data”) is becoming increasingly important as apart of criminal profiling by law enforcement as it relates to digital forensics and security.

The initiative is being supervised by Dr. Thorpe, Prof. M. Brian Blake, Vice Provost for Academic Affairs and Dean of the Graduate School, University of Miami and Dr. Iman Saleh, Assistant Research Scientist, the Graduate School and the Department of Computer Science, University of Miami. Mr. Julian Jarrett, Assistant Lecturer, SCIT, UTech was selected as the faculty member participating in this first internship period given his own teaching and research with respect of the specific funded project.

The University of Miami is a vibrant and diverse academic community focused on teaching and learning, the discovery of new knowledge and service to the South Florida region and beyond. The University is in the final stages of ratifying a Memorandum of Understanding for joint programmes with UTech as part of its thrust to enhance service interactions to underrepresented communities in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Further opportunities for interaction between faculty and students at both UTech and UoM will be facilitated through planned research seminars on topics including Artificial Intelligence, Software Testing and Evaluation, Formal Methods, Information Security, Database Systems, Project Management, as well Mathematical Modeling and Statistics which will be held during the period October 2013 to May 2014.

The collaboration between the two universities will also include a study tour during the 2013/2014 academic year to provide international experience and application of skills for post graduate students and staff teaching in the Information Systems Management(ISM) Masters Degree, the graduate diploma in ICT and the Masters by Research in Computer Science.