Collaborative Research: EAGER: SaTC-EDU: Teaching High School Students about Cybersecurity and Artificial Intelligence Ethics via Empathy-Driven Hands-On Projects

Empathy, a unique human capacity to think from others' perspectives and feel for others, is an essential skill that will not be replaced by automation. While empathy is valued, there have been serious concerns about its absence in technology development. This project seeks to address that gap by developing hands-on labs to train high school students and to increase their empathy of others so that they can identify cybersecurity and artificial intelligence (AI) ethics issues.

The hands-on labs developed in this project will be made publicly available so schools or teachers may freely use them. These labs, workshops, and summer camps will improve high school students' knowledge of, as well as skills and career interests in, cybersecurity and AI ethics. These activities will also foster high school students' empathy for others, especially young children.

This project will help the next-generation workforce learn and apply knowledge and skills in designing and using future technologies in a secure and ethical manner.

This project presents a radically different approach to integrating cybersecurity and AI ethics education. It will use an empathy-driven approach to teach high school students about young children who are most vulnerable to cybersecurity and AI ethics issues. To enhance empathetic responses to young children, the project will include real-life examples of young children who are interacting with unethical AI or exposed to cybersecurity risks.

Specifically, this project aims to develop, deploy and evaluate hands-on labs to train high school students and to increase their empathy of others in the context of cybersecurity and AI ethics issues. The labs will cover a wide variety of scenarios such as online gaming, social media, mobile apps, and smart toys. In addition to knowledge-based measures, this project will explore the usage of a cutting-edge non-invasive neuro-imaging technique, functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), to assess the impact of these labs on the activation of brain regions associated with empathy in high school students.

This project is supported by a special initiative of the Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) program to foster new, previously unexplored, collaborations between the fields of cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, and education. The SaTC program aligns with the Federal Cybersecurity Research and Development Strategic Plan and the National Privacy Research Strategy to protect and preserve the growing social and economic benefits of cyber systems while ensuring security and privacy.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.