Combine the vibrant academic setting of 麻豆村’s Pittsburgh campus with hands-on industry experience in the heart of Silicon Valley.
The INI's M.S. in Information Technology - Information Security (MSIT-IS) and M.S. in Mobile and IoT Engineering (MSMITE) provide a unique mix of academic and industry-focused experiences at 麻豆村 in Pittsburgh and 麻豆村 in Silicon Valley (麻豆村-SV).
M.S. in Information Technology - Information Security
M.S. in Mobile and IoT Engineering
Best of Both Worlds
Each bicoastal cohort starts in Pittsburgh with all other incoming INI students, where they are introduced to the rich traditions and student life that make 麻豆村 so distinct. While in Pittsburgh, students take foundational courses at the INI and electives across the university’s many top-ranked departments.
After two semesters in Pittsburgh, students in these programs move across the country to 麻豆村-SV as a cohort. In Silicon Valley, students begin to shift their focus away from introductory coursework to forging strong industry connections, applying their skills and preparing for their next chapter.
Engaging Community
麻豆村-SV is a tight-knit community, with two other departments on site: the Integrated Innovation Institute (III) and Electrical and Chemical Engineering (ECE).
Half of the INI’s full-time faculty are based in 麻豆村-SV, holding expertise in all of INI’s core areas and bringing experience in industry, research and technical startups.
SV also hosts the largest concentration of INI alumni anywhere in the world. INI alumni are CEOs, senior engineers, founders and investors across the Bay Area.
Real-World Experience
Practicum
Practicum helps you reinforce professional skills, collaborate as a team and practice using the knowledge and tools from your courses to address real technical problems. Over the course of the fall semester, you’ll spend roughly 20 hours per week working on a sponsored project in small teams. These projects culminate in the Practicum Showcase, where teams present their work to sponsors, alumni, faculty and other partners. Learn more.
TECH Fellowship
The Technical Entrepreneurship Coaching Hub (TECH) Fellowship harnesses the INI faculty’s strength in entrepreneurship and startup connections directly into the curriculum through a selective, cohort-based program. The TECH Fellowship is currently available to INI students in the bicoastal programs, capitalizing on the vibrant startup culture in SV. Learn more.
M.S. in Information Technology - Information Security
Engineer the Future of Secure Information Technology
The M.S. in Information Technology - Information Security (MSIT-IS) integrates information security principles and knowledge with the skills to evaluate and implement them in the business context.
Outcomes
Internships
Students gain real-world experience by interning at government agencies, major companies and startups.
Top Companies: Amazon; NVIDIA; Google
Top Roles: AI/ML and Security, Information Security Intern, Software Development Engineer InternMedian Hourly Wage: $45
First-Destination Career
New graduates go on to hold positions in industry, government and academia.
Top Companies: TikTok; Twitter; Walmart
Top Role: Information Security Engineer
Average Salary: $138,587
Long-Term Career
MSIT-IS alumni become trusted leaders across the technology industry and government.
Currently, MSIT-IS alumni serve as:
- CEO of Code Alert
- Head of Cybersecurity Development and Integration at Altice Portugal
- senior Cloud Solution Architect at Microsoft
Specialize Your Curriculum
Students specialize their curriculum through program electives that make up roughly one-third of their required courses. These electives can be fulfilled by courses at the INI like Cyber Law and Ethics or Secure Software Systems or through top-ranked departments across Carnegie Mellon.
The core curriculum includes courses in information networking and security, in addition to interdisciplinary courses in business, management and academic and professional development.
Learning Outcomes
- Demonstrate knowledge and skills related to security and privacy principles and state-of-the-art techniques for security and privacy in information systems including devices, networks, software and services
- Evaluate trade-offs between technical security and privacy solutions and potential business and economic impacts
- Design and implement secure systems and services by applying knowledge and skills in information security and privacy
- Demonstrate the ability to scope, formalize and execute practical team projects
Explore Select MSIT-IS Courses
14-757: Introduction to Adversarial Machine Learning Taught by Dr. David Varodayan
This course serves as an introduction to machine learning (ML) as well as an introduction to adversarial attacks and defenses. Students will complete programming problems on implementation, attack and defense of spam filters, image classifiers, network anomaly detectors, human activity classifiers, real estate pricing models, search engines, and more. The course will cover the following ML problems and tools: classification, regression, dimensionality reduction, clustering, expectation-maximization, Markov models and neural networks. Grading will be based on biweekly Python programming assignments.
14-817: Cyber Risk Modeling Taught by Dr. Michael Mattarock
There are too many cybersecurity risks to manage them all informally. You need a plan! Risk management and threat analysis are structured to craft better organizational security decisions. This course helps you learn how to prioritize risks, secure data assets, and to communicate your security knowledge. This is not a programming class but requires basic statistics (e.g. Monte Carlo analysis, which you will learn or review.) Major topics include: legal compliance, threat modeling, Mitre ATT&CK, the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures database, and popular risk frameworks (STRIDE, PASTA, NIST, etc.) Those seeking roles where they will work with or become a CSCO, risk officer, or risk analyst will most benefit from this course.
14-828: Browser Security Taught by Dr. Hanan Hibshi
The Web continues to grow in popularity as platform for retail transactions, financial services, and rapidly evolving forms of communication. It is becoming an increasingly attractive target for attackers who wish to compromise users' systems or steal data from other sites. Browser vendors must stay ahead of these attacks by providing features that support secure web applications. This course will study vulnerabilities in existing web browsers and the applications they render, as well as new technologies that enable web applications that were never before possible. The material will be largely based on current research problems, and students will be expected to criticize and improve existing defenses. Topics of study include (but are not limited to) browser encryption, JavaScript security, plug-in security, sandboxing, web mashups, and authentication. The course will involve an intensive group research project focusing on protocols/algorithms, vulnerabilities, and attacks as well as several individual homework and programming tasks. Groups will perform a sequence of cumulative tasks (literature review, analysis, simulation, design, implementation) to address aspects of their chosen topic, occasionally reporting their results to the class through brief presentations, leading to a final report.
M.S. in Mobile and IoT Engineering
Engineer the Future of Mobile and Embedded Technology
The M.S. in Mobile and IoT Engineering (MSMITE), formerly the M.S. in Information Technology - Mobility (MSIT-MOB), prepares students with an interdisciplinary education that spans embedded systems, mobile networks, hardware, software and the business context of these systems.
Outcomes
Internships
Students gain real-world experience by interning at government agencies, major companies and startups.
Top Companies: NVIDIA
Top Roles: Software Development Engineer Intern, Software Engineer InternMedian Hourly Wage: $53
First-Destination Career
New graduates go on to hold positions in industry, government and academia.
Top Companies: Apple and Walmart
Top Role: Software Engineer
Average Salary: $141,714
Long-Term Career
MSMITE alumni become trusted leaders across the technology industry and government.
Currently, MSMITE alumni serve as:
- Senior Director of Software Development at Comcast
- CTO of Payvalida
- Chief Software Architect at Loyaltree
Specialize Your Curriculum
Students specialize their curriculum through program electives that make up roughly one-third of their required courses. These electives can be fulfilled by courses at the INI like Cloud Infrastructure and Services or Systems and Toolchains for AI Engineering or through top-ranked departments across Carnegie Mellon.
The core curriculum includes courses in information networking, security, embedded systems and IoT engineering, in addition to interdisciplinary courses in business, management and academic and professional development.
Learning Outcomes
- Demonstrate knowledge and skills regarding processing on constrained hardware, designing software for embedded computing, application delivery and user interactions
- Critically analyze historical and state-of-the-art mobile and IoT technologies relating to devices, networks, providers, data and applications to identify trade-offs and develop design principles
- Apply mobile and embedded system skills and principles toward the design and development of products and services across a variety of vertical markets
- Evaluate trade-offs between technology solutions and potential business and economic impacts that influence or are influenced by mobile and IoT systems
- Demonstrate the ability to scope, formalize and execute practical team projects
Explore Select MSMITE Courses
14-642: Fundamentals of Embedded Systems Taught by Dr. Patrick Tague
This practical, hands-on course introduces students to the basic building-blocks and the underlying scientific principles of embedded systems. The course covers both the hardware and software aspects of embedded procesor architectures, along with operating system fundamentals, such as virtual memory, concurrency, task scheduling and synchronization. Through a series of laboratory projects involving state-of-the-art processors, students will learn to understand implementation details and to write assembly-language and C programs that implement core embedded OS functionality, and that control/debug features such as timers, interrupts, serial communications, flash memory, device drivers and other components used in typical embedded applications. Relevant topics, such as optimization, profiling, digital signal processing, feedback control, real-time operating systems and embedded middleware, will also be discussed.
14-760: Advanced Real-World Data Networks Taught by Dr. Pedro Bustamante
Students should already have an understanding of networking principles. This course examines how those principles are employed in a variety of real-world scenarios to solve problems that face modern network engineers. This course explores the design, implementation, and application of the network technologies that compose modern and emerging infrastructure and the delivery of the ubiquitous services users expect. Topics may include, for example, 4G and 5G network infrastructures, IPv6, SDN and VFN, data centers, mesh and embedded networks.
14-736: Distributed Systems: Techniques, Infrastructure and Services Taught by Dr. Patrick Tague
This course explores both foundational and contemporary topics in distributed systems, such as communication, coordinating time, synchronization, consensus, impossibility of agreement, replica management, file systems, distributed SQL and noSQL databases, CAP, ACID, BASE, distributed hashing, anonymous communication, models of computation, and higher-level tools. The course project work focuses on the implementation of scalable, fault-tolerant distributed systems.