As part of the IMPACT speaker series, Consul General of Israel to the Southeastern United States, Opher Aviran, spoke to Tech faculty and students to encourage political cooperation between the State of Israel and the Southeast United States. With the Gaza Strip crisis currently occurring, Aviran’s aim to strengthen ties is especially relevant.

The U.S. Department of State will explore the effects of mobile technology and their impact on diplomacy at Tech@State: Mobile Diplomacy on Friday, October 3, 2014. The event is designed to stimulate conversations between Department of State personnel and a wider community about ways mobile technologies can transform the work of diplomacy and development.

The Obama administration's new drive to battle the ideology of ISIS using social media is falling short of expectations and its potential because the White House was late to the game, disregarded the work of the previous administration and hasn't properly funded the effort, some experts and government officials say.

As ISIS and its supporters have turned to social media to spread extremist messages across the Middle Eastern region and world, the U.S. State Department has become an active player in the social media war against ISIS.

What Share America is serving up is bite-sized nuggets of video, photos and text, all optimized to be as shareable as possible on the Web. The goal is to feed content aligned with stated American values -- "democracy, freedom of expression, innovation, entrepreneurship, education, and the role of civil society," reads the site -- in the ever-hungry maw of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social networks.

The group, the Active Change Foundation, a community organization in East London, began a campaign this month built around the Twitter hashtag #notinmyname, which has denounced the beheading of the British aid worker David Haines and other brutal acts committed by the radical group Islamic State.