EAGER: SaTC-EDU: Integrating Cybersecurity into Artificial Intelligence Education

Artificial intelligence (AI) is an increasingly critical component for the computing workforce but also for society as a whole. Therefore, it is essential to safeguard AI technology from vulnerabilities and unintended uses. While the relevance of cybersecurity expertise to AI has never been clearer, these aspects of computing education are often addressed separately.

This project will integrate cybersecurity as a topic into university AI courses at multiple levels, ensuring that students who will someday build or maintain AI systems will have the skills they need to operate in an adversarial environment. The goal of this project is to improve education in this area and impact the future workforce in a way that leads to more secure and trustworthy AI systems.

The cybersecurity curriculum will be created in collaboration with instructors of university AI-related courses. It will be evaluated through classroom observation, interviews with instructors, and student surveys that measure learning outcomes, engagement, and attitude changes. As a result, this project will add to the body of knowledge for both AI and cybersecurity education in computer science, by evaluating the efficacy of integrated, cross-cutting approaches and learning experiences that situate cybersecurity content in the context of AI knowledge-building.

These curricular innovations will also have broader impacts through the creation and dissemination of open resources that can be used by other educators. Moreover, a computing curriculum that stresses social impact (by including, for example, harm mitigation) can improve retention and spark interest among students from traditionally underrepresented groups.

Finally, educational strategies for risk assessment and vulnerability analysis in the classroom will be evaluated for their usefulness and potential as models for practices within real-world AI design teams and will provide insights into strategies for better synergy between AI and cybersecurity in practical settings.

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.