Empowering Communities: How Outreach Creates Open-Access Resources

This session explores how community outreach can become a powerful engine for creating open-access resources. We will highlight real-world examples from a Cybersecurity Center, where outreach activities have been transformed into freely available materials for the global community. Outreach is a win-win scenario. It offers immediate and tangible benefits to the local community while simultaneously building a valuable, free repository of resources. By sharing our successful initiatives, we provide a blueprint for others to learn from, adapt, and implement similar programs in their own environments. Join us to discover how empowering your community can also enrich the open-access landscape

Machine Learning Techniques for Detecting Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attacks

Machine Learning Techniques for Detecting Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attacks — Kean University Research Day

Advancing Educational Equity: Lessons from Ikirwa School in Rural Tanzania

Ikirwa School, a nonprofit English-medium primary school founded in 2012 in Midawe Village, Tanzania, has become a model for advancing educational equity in rural, under-resourced regions. Serving 200 students from nursery through class seven with over 40% receiving full sponsorship and more than half boarding. Ikirwa exemplifies how access and inclusion transform outcomes. Within its first five years, it ranked 89th out of over 7,000 schools nationally, reflecting the impact of community-driven education. Ikirwa’s holistic, bilingual curriculum integrates core academics, Kiswahili instruction, digital literacy, and locally relevant learning. Through global collaborations, including virtual coding lessons from university volunteers and weekly Google Meet exchanges with U.S. classrooms students connect across continents, expanding their horizons while remaining rooted in community values. This presentation draws on over a decade of engagement to highlight strategies such as grassroots fundraising, infrastructure development, and cross-cultural partnerships that sustain access and inclusion. Despite challenges like unreliable electricity, poor roads, and intermittent internet, Ikirwa continues to innovate through its digital library and remote learning initiatives. Participants will gain practical insights into fostering equity through sponsorships, inclusive curriculum design, and international collaboration. Offering a Southern, community-led perspective on open access and educational innovation, this case study demonstrates how small schools in remote areas can leverage limited resources to deliver globally connected, transformative learning

NSA CAE-CD Community Service Award 2025

https://www.caecommunity.org/community-of-practice/cyber-defense/cop-cd-national-community-service-recognition-awards-initiativ

AdversaGuard: A Distributed Data-Poisoning Benchmark for Parallel AI

As organizations scale model training across large clusters and clouds, data poisoning has emerged as a significant practical threat. Most existing research focuses on data poisoning in single-node environments. Far fewer studies have compared the effectiveness of attacks across parallel training strategies, where factors like gradient aggregation and distributed memory ceilings fundamentally alter attack detectability and its impacts. To address this gap, we introduce AdversaGuard, a reproducible benchmark and accompanying application designed specifically for distributed settings to protect AI training pipelines. This research makes the following key contributions: (1) A comprehensive Distributed Data Poisoning (DDP) benchmark spanning seven distributed systems (leveraging data, model, and hybrid parallelism) and a non-distributed baseline. (2) A standardized attack suite implementing eight poisoning methods with consistent budgets for fair comparison. (3) An analysis of how different parallel strategies modulate attack impacts, demonstrating that design choices can either mask or amplify vulnerabilities. (4) A publicly available interactive application for live testing and method comparison. And (5) A novel evaluation metric, the AdversaGuard Efficiency Index (AEI), which provides a composite score for DDP robustness considering accuracy, attack success, model size, and computational overhead. To evaluate AdversaGuard as an HPC-oriented framework for benchmarking adversarial robustness and training efficiency in distributed data poisoning (DDP) settings, we experimented with eight system configurations—seven distributed regimes and a baseline—across three food-domain image datasets and four model families, ranging from compact CNNs to large Vision Transformers. Within AdversaGuard framework, we implemented eight common adversarial attacks, such as FGSM, PGD, DeepFool, and Carlini-Wagner, and analyzed how data, model, nd hybrid parallelism affect scalability, memory consumption, and vulnerability. Our key findings are that while data parallelism’s gradient averaging can mask low-budget perturbations, larger models consistently exhibit greater susceptibility to poisoning. To quantify these trade-offs, we introduce the AdversaGuard Efficiency Index (AEI), a composite metric for evaluating parallelism-aware robustness. Our implementation of a companion AdversaGuard application enables live testing (GitHub repository) with the help of a live demo (YouTube). This work underscores the critical need for scalable, adaptive defenses in modern, distributed AI training pipeline

CO-NET: FROM NETS TO NESTING

CO-NET was an international Design-Build initiative that brought together over forty students and faculty from the United States and China to build a series of experimental structures on Dongtou, an island near Wenzhou renowned for its fishing industry, ceramic artisans, and tidal landscapes. Developed through a four-month remote collaboration and an intensive on-site construction phase, the project explored the architectural potential of locally sourced waste materials—discarded fishing gear, construction debris, obsolete scaffolding, and plastic waste—through vernacular craft techniques and interdisciplinary design processes. CO-NET functioned as a pedagogical platform for material-driven design, emphasizing sustainability, circularity, and intercultural exchange

NSA CAE-CD Community Service Award - Mentor - 2025

https://www.caecommunity.org/community-of-practice/cyber-defense/cop-cd-national-community-service-recognition-awards-initiativ

OER in the age of AI and Academic Integrity

OER\u27s Intersection with Artificial Intelligence and Academic Integrity In this session, David Harris, Senior Vice President at ASU+GSV Summit, will explore how emerging market data is reshaping the role of Open Educational Resources (OER) in the age of artificial intelligence. Drawing on recent findings across the higher education landscape, David will examine evolving value perceptions and shifts in student behavior since 2019. While the data presents real challenges, it also reveals powerful opportunities for the OER community to advance learning outcomes, strengthen academic integrity, and promote equity in an AI-driven world. Prior to joining ASU+GSV, David served as Editor-in-Chief at OpenStax, the world’s largest OER publisher

Time to Open Health Professions Education: A Guide to Open Pedagogy in HPE

This presentation introduces a collaborative initiative to create a practical guide on Open Pedagogy in Health Professions Education (HPE). Developed by an international team of students, early-career professionals, and educators, the guide addresses the lack of shared definitions and practical direction on openness in the field. It explores open pedagogy in HPE, the use and creation of health-related Open Educational Resources (OER), and strategies to foster advocacy and faculty engagement. This session will share the co-creation process, highlight key content, and invite HPE educators to see how open practices can take shape in their context—laying the groundwork for broader participation and future initiatives in the field. Health Professions Education (HPE) remains one of the least explored fields in open education. Yet, the need for adaptable, participatory learning models in HPE has never been greater. Our session introduces a collaboratively authored Open Pedagogy Guide for HPE—developed by an international team of students, educators, and early-career professionals—to bridge gaps in shared definitions, practical strategies, and advocacy for openness in the field. We will explore the guide’s development, highlighting its key themes: redefining open pedagogy in HPE, integrating health-specific OERs, & fostering faculty engagement. Attendees will gain insights into the co-creation process, including challenges and successes of coordinating across time zones, disciplines, and professional hierarchies. By showcasing this initiative, we aim to inspire educators to adapt open practices in their contexts, laying the groundwork for broader participation and future initiatives in the field

Expanding Access to ​ Holocaust Education: ​ How the HERC Advances Open Learning and Equity

This presentation highlights the Holocaust Education & Resource Center\u27s commitment to open educational resources through publicly available archival materials hosted in our collection. These pieces showcases collaborative curriculum development and equitable best practices among students, educators, and scholars. The initiative also emphasizes partnerships with libraries and digital learning platforms to expand access and engagement in Holocaust education