Students are strongly encouraged to complete their independent Capstone Project (CP) as one of their elective choices during the final semester. Here students will find details on choosing a project, choosing a mentor, writing their proposal, and completing the process. The CP goal is to demonstrate fluency with the tools of scholarship and professional practice in their field, an ability to independently plan and carry out a non-trivial piece of work, and an ability to present their work in written and oral formats.
It is suggested that students are encouraged to have a customer for whom they are developing their solution. This could be a company, a professor, or several people selected as representing people in the potential market. The objective of the project would be to solve the customer’s problem, and the customer would therefore assist the instructor in evaluating the work.
It is strongly suggested that students work in groups of at least four, and preferably five or six, on their CP, except for the case of a research form CP, in which the group should consist of at most three. Strategies must be developed to handle situations where the contribution of team members is unequal.
IA students are encouraged with proposals in either fields of 45 smaller cubes (areas) in the Integrated IA Model (Figure 1) emphasizing on its core (Figure 2): Availability, Integrity, Authentication, Confidentiality, Non-repudiation. In an outstanding case a CP proposal may be chosen following NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) recommendations in other fields of IA at its official website http://csrc.nist.gov/, the FU Committee will consider it in accordance with NIST’s standards.