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SINGAPORE - People can expect to sign up for Singapore's first free, teacher-less computer science programme by 2022.

Offered by French non-profit university Ecole 42 and the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD), the course will be open to anyone aged 18 and above, regardless of their background in coding or mathematics.

Supported by SkillsFuture Singapore, the new programme - dubbed 42 Singapore - aims to develop a pipeline of tech talent for the digital economy.

Instead of classroom-based lessons delivered by lecturers and textbooks, students will learn tech skills in areas such as cyber security and network infrastructure at their own pace, advancing through project-based learning and gamification.

The first cohort of 150 students under the new programme in Singapore is expected to start by the end of 2022, with recruitment done through one or more admissions exercises a year, said SUTD in a statement on Tuesday (Nov 23).

Admissions at Ecole 42 schools are highly competitive, with applicants being selected after an intensive four-week bootcamp known as the "Piscine" or French for swimming pool.

The brainchild of French businessman and billionaire Xavier Niel first opened in Paris in 2013, and has since grown to a network of 36 campuses worldwide.

At the signing of an agreement between the two universities on Tuesday, Education Minister Chan Chun Sing said the programme's emphasis on aptitude and skill-based admission is in line with the spirit of new policies rolled out by the Ministry of Education.

He said: "Since last year, the autonomous universities (in Singapore) have expanded their practice of aptitude-based admissions.

"They are now relying less on academic grades, and more on other yardsticks of merit such as the interests and non-academic achievements of applicants, so that a more holistic range of aptitude and attributes can be considered."

The partnership with Ecole 42 has been in the making since November 2019, Mr Chan said.

Hailing the French universityas a trailblazer in innovation, he lauded the curriculum for bringing together students from different backgrounds and training them with in-demand skills and industry knowledge through real world projects.

Education Minister Chan Chun Sing (second from right) at the SUTD-Ecole 42 MOU signing ceremony on Nov 23, 2021.PHOTO: SUTD

He called for more of such innovative models of teaching being applied for training in other sectors beyond the information communications technology sector.

Highlighting that the Covid-19 pandemic has restricted cross-border exchanges, Mr Chan said he is looking forward to further discussions between France and Singapore on how to resume student exchanges and more avenues to preserve interactions between students and faculty.

Ambassador of France to Singapore Marc Abensour, who also witnessed Tuesday's event, said that Singapore had about 500 students studying in France before the pandemic.

Reaffirming the long-standing relationship between the two countries in higher education, Mr Abensour called for closer collaboration in upskilling and reskilling their workforces.

Students at 42 Singapore will have access to workshops, events and competitions organised by the SUTD community.

In its statement, SUTD said it is still seeking industrial partnerships to co-support the new 42 Singapore programme.

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Singapore's first free, teacher-less computer science programme to be launched by 2022 - The Straits Times

Hometown: Naperville, Ill.Concentration: Government, Technology Science Track

Trisha Prabhu is dedicated to making the internet a safer place. At Harvard, Prabhu is concentrating in government on the tech science track, which looks at the unexpected consequences of technology and aims to create new solutions to conflicts between technology and society.

My goal will be to continue the work that Ive had the chance to do here at Harvard, where I look at the unforeseen consequences of technology and the internet on our society, Prabhu said. I think about how we can solve the internets harms and try to create a digital world that is more kind, inclusive, and fair.

Prabhu is the founder and CEO of ReThink Inc., an app that detects offensive digital content and allows users the opportunity to reconsider posting it online.She also holds several patents and was recently a Civic Digital Fellow at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, where she helped lead the KidneyX Accelerator to incentivize businesses and innovators to work on kidney care technology solutions.

At Oxford, Prabhu hopes to study the social science of the internet and public policy.

Being named a Rhodes Scholar is such a surreal, yet very special experience. More than anything, I just feel such immense gratitude for the people that have gotten me here, members of the Harvard community like my professors, who encouraged me to go after an opportunity like this and equipped me with the skills and confidence, Prabhu said. She noted that shes excited to join the exceptional community at Oxford, with smart changemakers who care deeply about the problems that they want to try to affect change on.

Hometown: Brossard, Quebec, CanadaConcentration: Applied Mathematics and Economics, Secondary in Philosophy

An applied mathematics and economics concentrator, Ramiz Razzak studies monetary and fiscal tools that can be used to manage economic crises, which typically disproportionately affect the most vulnerable. As part of his senior thesis, Razzak is investigating whether central banks should use interest rate policy to counteract the buildup of financial imbalances. His research is also looking at whether North American monetary policy has historically been responsive to changes in sentiment in credit markets.

At Oxford, Razzak hopes to continue this work, with a particular focus on how current economic tools affect financial stability and inequality. He intends to study economic and social history.

I really am passionate about that research, because I feel that people who are most vulnerable during those types of events are the ones that get hit first, he said. If we can get even a little bit more clarity in terms of how to go about doing a better job using monetary and fiscal tools, I think that we can have a big impact.

While hes unsure where his studies will take him, Razzak is sure about one thing: He eventually wants to return home to Canada to serve his community.

I dont know what form itll take, Razzak said. If its through monetary policy at the Bank of Canada or fiscal policy with the Department of Finance Canada, or even involvement in Quebec, I just know thats something that I hold dearly. I want to give back to a community in a country that has given so much to me.

Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer

Hometown: Spanishtown, JamaicaSchool: Harvard Graduate School of Education

Tonia N. Williams sees her next chapter at Oxford as a chance to continue to pursue her academic passion for education a journey she began at Harvard last year. Williams, who is a masters student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, will seek a doctorate in experimental psychology with a focus on developmental psychology.

Williams entered Vassar College with a desire to learn more about the intersections of computer science and education, and focused on psychology. By the end of college, she had a strong foundation in neuroscience and other physiological elements of psychology but wanted to expand her understanding of early childhood development.

That led to her HGSE degree and a position as a research assistant in the Spelke Lab at the Harvard Laboratory for Developmental Studies. At Oxford, she wants to continue learning about psychological research in early childhood development that can be used to improve education.

This whole process taught me to trust my instincts, said Williams. I almost applied for the Rhodes last year and didnt because I thought my application could be stronger this year. I followed my interests from computer science and education to physiological psychology and back to human development. My interests have pulled me in different directions, Ive trusted the process, and its all worked out.

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A chance to focus on an academic passion at Oxford - Harvard Gazette

The HuntsvilleTechSupport team is, from left, Nolan Rodgers, Will Green, Dayton Hasty, Sydney Winters and Ethan Reiland.

Courtesy UAH Cyber Club

A University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) student team has placed fifth out of 120 teams in nationwide virtual competition at the recent three-week-long U.S. Department of Energy CyberForce Competition.

The computer and cybersecurity students call their team HuntsvilleTechSupport. An element of the Cyber Club at UAH, a part of the University of Alabama System, HuntsvilleTechSupport has been competing in Jeopardy-style capture the flag (CTF) competitions for a little over a year.

Jeopardy-style CTFs present competitors with a set of questions that reveal clues that guide them in solving complex tasks in a specific order. By revealing clues, contestants learn the right direction regarding techniques and methodologies that are needed. CTF involves a number of true-to-life cyber challenges that each result in a text-based flag. These challenges are worth points, depending on difficulty, and they mirror the challenges professionals would face.

Advised by Dr. Tathagata Mukherjee, an assistant professor of computer science, HuntsvilleTechSupport placed in the top three in the university team category in competitions including the local National Cyber Summit Cyber Cup Challenge and BSides Huntsville.

We have been fortunate enough to have students who are self-motivated and who work and learn on their own time, Dr. Mukherjee says.

Though we as faculty have tried to provide support to them, there is only so much we can do given the time that is required to prepare for these types of national competitions, he says. As a result, I will put the credit for this success with the students and all the faculty members that have taught them over their years at UAH. Without that solid grounding and the hard work of the students, this would not have been possible."

Team members are Sydney Winters of Catlettsburg, Ky., a sophomore in computer engineering; Will Green of Huntsville, a sophomore in cybersecurity engineering; Dayton Hasty of Shelbyville, Tenn., a senior in computer science; Nolan Rodgers of Columbia, Tenn., a junior in cybersecurity engineering; and Ethan Reiland of Downington, Pa., a sophomore in computer science.

It feels pretty good placing so high after we have worked so hard on this competition for the past few weeks while balancing end of the year tests and projects, says Green, who was team captain for this event. We have had a lot of CTF practice over the past year, but defense competitions are relatively new to most of our team members.

Though competition began three weeks beforehand, Green says the official competition day was Nov. 13.

The competition itself was virtual this year, but our team met both virtually and in person to get the network set up and compete, he says. This is an annual competition, UAH competed in 2018 and 2019, but did not in 2020 because 2020s competition was individual, not team-based.

During the CyberForce competition, teams were given a virtual network filled with vulnerabilities and misconfigurations and had to fix and secure the entire network.

In this years scenario, we were acting as the blue team of a hydropower company, tasked with hardening and securing our systems against cyberattacks including the industrial control system controlling a dam facility all while maintaining our required services, Green says. In the week leading up to the competition, we had to create security documentation which included all of the changes that we made, a network diagram and the reasons for the new mitigations we put into place.

Teams also had to submit a video to a C-Suite Panel, presenting what would be done in a fictional merger scenario to secure the network from incoming machines and networks, says Hasty, who is the president of the UAH Cyber Club.

On competition day, we had to make sure our network was completely secure while a red team attacked and tried to exploit known or new vulnerabilities, Hasty says. If the red team found a vulnerability and was able to gain access to one of our machines, we had to then mitigate that vulnerability.

The competitions CTF element was composed of challenges released on competition day for teams to solve while they dealt with keeping their networks secure from the red team.

Points were awarded based on keeping up critical services, usability of those services, solving anomalies, mitigating the red team's exploited vulnerabilities, securing our network beforehand, our security documentation and our C-Suite Panel video, Hasty says.

The future for HuntsvilleTechSupport includes more competitions.

As far as defense-based competitions go, we plan on competing in the National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition next year, Hasty says. There are fewer cyber defense competitions than there are normal Jeopardy-style CTF competitions. We normally compete in a CTF every weekend, which is a good way to practice while earning our team points on the global leaderboard.

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Student cyber competition team is fifth of 120 competing in DOE contest - UAH News

When the cloud storage firm Dropbox decided to shut down its offices with the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, co-founder and CEO Drew Houston05 had to send the companys nearly 3,000 employees home and tell them they were not coming back to work anytime soon. It felt like I was announcing a snow day or something.

In the early days of the pandemic, Houston says that Dropbox reacted as many others did to ensure that employees were safe and customers were taken care of. Its surreal, theres no playbook for running a global company in a pandemic over Zoom. For a lot of it we were just taking it as we go.

Houston talked about his experience leading Dropbox through a public health crisis and how Covid-19 has accelerated a shift to distributed work in a fireside chat on Oct. 14 with Dan Huttenlocher, dean of the MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing.

During the discussion, Houston also spoke about his $10 million gift to MIT, which will endow the first shared professorship between the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and the MIT Sloan School of Management, as well as provide a catalyst startup fund for the college.

The goal is to find ways to unlock more of our brainpower through a multidisciplinary approach between computing and management, says Houston. "It's often at the intersection of these disciplines where you can bring people together from different perspectives, where you can have really big unlocks. I think academia has a huge role to play [here], and I think MIT is super well-positioned to lead. So, I want to do anything I can to help with that."

Virtual first

While the abrupt swing to remote work was unexpected, Houston says it was pretty clear that the entire way of working as we knew it was going to change indefinitely for knowledge workers. Theres a silver lining in every crisis, says Houston, noting that people have been using Dropbox for years to work more flexibly so it made sense for the company to lean in and become early adopters of a distributed work paradigm in which employees work in different physical locations.

Dropbox proceeded to redesign the work experience throughout the company, unveiling a virtual first working model in October 2020 in which remote work is the primary experience for all employees. Individual work spaces went by the wayside and offices located in areas with a high concentration of employees were converted into convening and collaborative spaces called Dropbox Studios for in-person work with teammates.

Theres a lot we could say about Covid, but for me, the most significant thing is that well look back at 2020 as the year we shifted permanently from working out of offices to primarily working out of screens. Its a transition thats been underway for a while, but Covid completely finished the swing, says Houston.

Envisioning the Future Workplace: A Fireside Chat with Drew Houston of Dropbox

Designing for the future workplace

Houston says the pandemic also prompted Dropbox to reevaluate its product line and begin thinking of ways to make improvements. Weve had this whole new way of working sort of forced on us. No one designed it; it just happened. Even tools like Zoom, Slack, and Dropbox were designed in and for the old world.

Undergoing that process helped Dropbox gain clarity on where they could add value and led to the realization that they needed to get back to their roots. In a lot of ways, what people need today in principle is the same thing they needed in the beginning one place for all their stuff, says Houston.

Dropbox reoriented its product roadmap to refocus efforts from syncing files to organizing cloud content. The company is focused on building toward this new direction with the release of new automation features that users can easily implement to better organize their uploaded content and find it quickly. Dropbox also recently announced the acquisitionof Command E, a universal search and productivity company, to help accelerate its efforts in this space.

Houston views Dropbox as still evolving and sees many opportunities ahead in this new era of distributed work. We need to design better tools and smarter systems. Its not just the individual parts, but how theyre woven together. Hes surprised by how little intelligence is actually integrated into current systems and believes that rapid advances in AI and machine learning will soon lead to a new generation of smart tools that will ultimately reshape the nature of work in the same way that we had a new generation of cloud tools revolutionize how we work and had all these advantages that we couldnt imagine not having now.

Founding roots

Houston famously turned his frustration with carrying USB drives and emailing files to himself into a demo for what became Dropbox.

After graduating from MIT in 2005 with a bachelors degree in electrical engineering and computer science, he teamed up with fellow classmate Arash Ferdowsi to found Dropbox in 2007 and led the companys growth from a simple idea to a service used by 700 million people around the world today.

Houston credits MIT for preparing him well for his entrepreneurial journey, recalling that what surprised him most about his student experience was how much he learned outside the classroom. At the event, he stressed the importance of developing both sides of the brain to a select group of computer science and management students who were in attendance, and a broader live stream audience. One thing you learn about starting a company is that the hardest problems are usually not technical problems; theyre people problems. He says that he didnt realize it at the time, but some of his first lessons in management were gained by taking on responsibilities in his fraternity and in various student organizations that evoked a sense of being on the hook.

As CEO, Houston has had a chance to look behind the curtain at how things happen and has come to appreciate that problems dont solve themselves. While individual people can make a huge difference, he explains that many of the challenges the world faces right now are inherently multidisciplinary ones, which sparked his interest in the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing.

He says that the mindset embodied by the college to connect computing with other disciplines resonated and inspired him to initiate his biggest philanthropic effort to date sooner rather than later because we dont have that much time to address these problems.

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In MIT visit, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston '05 explores the accelerated shift to distributed work - MIT News