One of the more interesting things we did today was listen to a systems engineer talk about what he does on a daily basis. This would allow us a glimpse into the day to day life of this certain profession, which can help us make informed decisions about what we want to pursue in college and beyond. We also learned about what he did before Cisco. He did an internship with the DoD, and had summer jobs at other places like Amazon. He also told us about college and how he swapped his major, which is totally normal and fine. Overall, this was a helpful window into the life of a systems engineer at Cisco.
Tag: STEM
Orientation
Today was a general orientation day, where we went over two main things: Cisco culture and the pitch project. The main takeaways I had from Cisco’s culture is that it is a competitive yet supportive environment and that they encourage community service. The pitch project entails us learning about a Cisco product and then “pitching” it in an attempt to get our school to buy it. Our audience will be both the higher ups and IT people, so we will need to understand both the business and technical effects of our choice product.
-Price
AppDynamics
Today we went over three things: Meraki, Data Centers, and AppDynamics. Focusing on the AppDynamics, it is a system that allows users to monitor the performance of apps. It reports on their speed, crashes, and errors, and even allows you to trace the problems to specific methods in the code. This makes it very easy to fix problems in apps and provide the best user experience. The presenter also went into detail about less thought of ways of how this is important. If Amazon’s website is slow during the input of credit card information, users could become worried about the safety of their data. AppDynamics allows these problems to be identified and fixed quickly.
-Price
Google Saves the Day
Once again today, we met with Dr. Aziz and Leah to review the work we had done last time. This time, we went over individually what we could do to improve our models and went over several mathematical formulas that could improve the realism of our work. I was suggested that I could implement an aging system to the simulated fungus in which the enzymes they produce decreases the longer they’re alive, which I added. I also tried swapping around the values in the equations for the temperature slider I added last time. I suck at math, so it took me an hour to figure out, but I eventually got it. I also tried to make it so the simulated glucose is able to randomly move around the model, but after much experimenting, I was unable to figure it out. I eventually just turned to googling the answer and was able to piece together the process, shown below, from several different pages. In each patch, or in each small part of the simulation, it causes a random amount of glucose to move to a random nearby patch each time the simulation progresses. We were told by Dr. Aziz that next week, we will be working mainly independently, and he will only check in with us once or twice.
Day 3!
My favorite meeting we attended today was our first meeting where we talked about Cisco’s Umbrella. Umbrella was a company that Cisco bought relatively recently. We attended a demo of the program where we were able to learn about how different companies, businesses, or schools might implement Umbrella in order to provide more security/ protection of their data.
Umbrella is unlike a lot of other security brands because instead of blocking a source after loading the website/email attachment, Umbrella blocks the threat based on the categories that the given threat fits under; some examples include newly seen domains, malware, cryptomining, etc. This prevents the virus or malicous code from even entering the comptuer and then traveling throughout the network.
In our second session, we learned about how buissnesses/companies can use Secure X (a dashboard that holds all things security) in combination with Umbrella and other secuirity products. These products do not just have to come from Cisco; there is a growing number of three party products that are constantly being added to the Secure X platform. Secure X simplifies and condesnses everything the average IT person would need to know all in one place.
This is a screenshot from our meeting about Secure X. It shows what a possible Secure X dashboard could look like.
-Grace
Presentation Mode – Lenovo Day 3 – Sarah
Today, we started off with our morning meeting. We briefly presented what we had worked on the previous day and then launched right into discussing our final presentation. One of our goals for the two weeks is to complete a presentation discussing how NFTs work and what their potential applications could be in the future, as well as why a potential investor should be interested in them.
After the meeting, all the students in the WEP joined a call together and we worked on our table of contents; we established a narrative that we wanted our presentation to tell. It felt cool – almost like we were a real team putting together a real presentation for a potential investor. After our afternoon meeting we all came away with new research topics – I’m researching decentralized autonomous organizations.
Day 3: Vector Textiles Environmental Modeling, Researching Indirect Impact of Permethrin on Humans
Today was mainly focused on researching the indirectly impacts of the chemical Permethrin on humans. We had a check in media with Mr. Self do discuss what we had accomplished so far and what we were aiming to complete in the coming days. Today’s research was extremely interesting. I was expecting to find basic information about how Permethrin affects animals, and how those animals might come into contact with humans and harm them. However, my research eventually took me to looking at the exporting and importing levels of fish in sub-Saharan Africa. Since sub-Saharan Africa is one of the main exporters of capture catch fish in the world, I was able to calculate the amount of people worldwide that could be affected by Permethrin being introduced into sub-Saharan Africa. I had no idea the consequences would be so wide spread. I can’t wait to dive deeper into this research tomorrow!
SecureX
Today we went over three of Cisco’s security products: Umbrella, SecureX, and Duo. SecureX was the most complex because it acts as a suite of systems from anti-malware software to file monitoring to firewalls. At the heart of SecureX, it allows users to find, track, and isolate threats before they can cause harm. SecureX is related to a group of threat intelligence researchers and telemetry agents called Talos; this group monitors internet traffic to help spot vulnerabilities and zero-days before most other groups and eliminate them before they can be exploited. It was interesting seeing the innovations Cisco has that allows them to be unique from their competitors.
-Price
Enzyme Kinetics: Inhibiting Factors
This morning, Ethan and I met with Dr. Aziz and Leah again. We shared our work from the previous day and began discussing some more ideas about how to make this fungi model more realistic. We had a very interesting discussion about different mathematical equations that could be used to model various variables’ effects on the reaction rate (e.g. temperature, pH, UV light, and dissolved oxygen) and ways to model water flow (in the real system, water would be flowing through the fungi filter).
After our meeting, to get a better context for our research, I spent some time reading a journal article that Leah shared detailing the different mechanisms that the fungi’s enzymes use to break down pollutants.
I spent the bulk of my day fine-tuning the enzyme kinetics aspect of the model (shoutout to Mr. Rushin–iykyk). I was working on writing code to incorporate the relationships between temperature, pH, UV light, and dissolved oxygen into the model. For each of the variables, there’s a sweet spot, where the rate is the fastest and enzymes function best. Then, on either side of the sweet spot, the rate decreases.
Look at all my bell curves! Each of these is for one of the variables. You can see the sweet spot is at the peak of the curve and the curve tapers off on both sides.
Below, you can see how the different conditions affect the rate of the reaction. On the left is when all of the variables are set to the optimal conditions. On the right is when the conditions are too acidic, so the enzymes don’t do their job 🙁
-Emily
Day 2!
Today we attended 3 sessions each about different architectures: Meraki, Data Center, and AppDynamics. For the first session about Meraki, we learned about the creation and applications of the program/company. Meraki allows the admin to make edits to the code of one Data Center and then push all the updates to every Data Center connected to the given network without having to go to each one individually. Meraki allows businesses, using their advanced camera system, to be able to track traffic inside their stores, count the number of people entering or exiting their store, and even determine whether customers are wearing masks and social distancing or not. The third session we attended was about AppDynamics; AppDynamics allows the admin users to be able to better understand when the app crashes, where is the problem located and who is responsible for the crash. It helps to pinpoint a specific problem which significantly reduces the time it takes to eliminate a given problem. In general, we learned about how all of Cisco’s architectures are meant to streamline the process for business owners and companies by creating simple and straightforward layouts and designs.
Here is a picture of what the Meraki dashboard looks like:
Link: https://meraki.cisco.com/form/demo
Here is a picture of what the AppDymanics dashboard looks like:
Link: https://www.appdynamics.com/solutions/cisco/cisco-workload-optimization-manager
– Grace