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- All Subjects: Cybersecurity
- Creators: Computer Science and Engineering Program
- Member of: Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection
- Resource Type: Text
To bridge the gap between the growing sales industry there is the ability to properly train Millennials so they are successful and stay within their roles longer. By attacking this problem from a university level by strengthening sales programs as well as having employers understand and respond to needs of the Millennial generation, this will create an overall successful Millennial salesperson that will stay with their employer long term.
Strengths and weaknesses of this generation are also important to understand. Millennials are known to be tech-savvy, open-minded, collaborative, and connected, resourceful networkers. They also carry weaknesses and stereotypes of being lazy, lacking communication skills, impatient, entitled, and demanding of feedback and work flexibility. From an employer, they expect a large salary as well as a good culture, manager feedback, a mentor, work-life integration, an employer with a social responsibility mindset, and a sense of purpose.
An analysis of 12 sales programs at various universities across the country helped to understand what is being taught and offered to students as well as commonalities and differences that make a strong sales program. Commonalities among these programs include, about 250+ students, high job placement, sales labs, hosting and competing in sales competitions, and a desire to expand and grow their programs. Unique aspects of various programs were partnerships with the sales industry, hosting fundraisers, student ambassadors for the sales program, CRM courses, and internships and competition requirements.
Primary research was conducted to understand various sales development programs from companies in the sales industry. The 12 companies that participated in this research were from Arizona State University’s Sales Advisory Board. These companies completed a survey that provided detailed information of their onboarding and training process as well as their opinions of Millennial employees.
From this research, recommendations were formed for employers,
• creating a collaborative and innovative culture
• A mentorship program
• work flexibility
• continuous learning
• sense of purpose
As for Arizona State’s Sales Program, recommendations include,
• a mentorship program between Sales Scholars and the Sales Advisory Board
• creating a sales lab
• implementing CRM curriculum in classes
• continued support from the Board and alumni of the sales program
Machine learning has a near infinite number of applications, of which the potential has yet to have been fully harnessed and realized. This thesis will outline two departments that machine learning can be utilized in, and demonstrate the execution of one methodology in each department. The first department that will be described is self-play in video games, where a neural model will be researched and described that will teach a computer to complete a level of Super Mario World (1990) on its own. The neural model in question was inspired by the academic paper “Evolving Neural Networks through Augmenting Topologies”, which was written by Kenneth O. Stanley and Risto Miikkulainen of University of Texas at Austin. The model that will actually be described is from YouTuber SethBling of the California Institute of Technology. The second department that will be described is cybersecurity, where an algorithm is described from the academic paper “Process Based Volatile Memory Forensics for Ransomware Detection”, written by Asad Arfeen, Muhammad Asim Khan, Obad Zafar, and Usama Ahsan. This algorithm utilizes Python and the Volatility framework to detect malicious software in an infected system.
During October 2022, I contributed to the annual Cybersecurity Awareness Month (CSAM) program at Arizona State University (ASU). 4 cybersecurity domains were explored during the month: phishing, password hygiene, physical security, and social media security. The scope of my work involved designing and developing activities related to phishing and social media security. The deliverables included 8 emails for the ‘Spot the Phish’ activity, an educational flier on phishing indicators, discussion questions for The Tinder Swindler documentary, and a password security question guessing game. I also collected feedback from students and faculty who participated in ‘Spot the Phish’ and the security question game. Participants answered questions about the difficulty of the activities and how their cybersecurity knowledge improved. The security question game didn’t have much participation, so there wasn’t much information to gather from the feedback. The ‘Spot the Phish’ activity had over 50 feedback submissions. That data suggested that the ‘Spot the Phish’ activity improved participants’ confidence in identifying phishing emails. After reviewing the feedback and my own anecdotal experience conducting the activities, I looked into research regarding tools for cybersecurity education. Based on that research, I designed new activities to better inform students and faculty about phishing and social media security for 2023 CSAM.
Fuzzing is currently a thriving research area in the cybersecurity field. This work begins by introducing code that brings partial replayability capabilities to AFL++ in an attempt to solve the challenge of the highly random nature of fuzzing that comes from the large amount of random mutations on input seeds. The code addresses two of the three sources of nondeterminism described in this work. Furthermore, this work introduces Fuzzing Debugger (FDB), a highly configurable framework to facilitate the debugging of fuzzing by interfacing with GDB. Three debugging modes are described which attempt to tackle two use cases of FDB: (1) pinpointing nondeterminism in fuzz runs, therefore paving the way for replayable fuzz runs and (2) systematically finding preferable stopping points seed analysis.
