Towards an AI to Win Ghana's National Science and Maths Quiz

Can an AI win Ghana's National Science and Maths Quiz (NSMQ)? That is the question we seek to answer in the NSMQ AI project, an open-source project that is building AI to compete live in the NSMQ and win. The NSMQ is an annual live science and mathematics competition for senior secondary school students in Ghana in which 3 teams of 2 students compete by answering questions across biology, chemistry, physics, and math in 5 rounds over 5 progressive stages until a winning team is crowned for that year. The NSMQ is an exciting live quiz competition with interesting technical challenges across speech-to-text, text-to-speech, question-answering, and human-computer interaction. In this ongoing work that began in January 2023, we give an overview of the project, describe each of the teams, progress made thus far, and the next steps toward our planned launch and debut of the AI in October for NSMQ 2023. An AI that conquers this grand challenge can have real-world impact on education such as enabling millions of students across Africa to have one-on-one learning support from this AI.Comment: 7 pages. Under review at Deep Learning Indaba and Black in AI Workshop @NeurIPS 202

Security-Focused Prototyping: A Natural Precursor to Secure Development

Secure development is often thought of as a proactive approach to cyber security. Rather than building a technological solution and then securing it in retrospect, secure development strives to embed good security practices throughout the development process and reduce risk. Unfortunately, evidence suggests secure development is complex, costly, and limited in practice. This article therefore introduces security-focused prototyping as a natural precursor to secure development. Security-focused prototyping embeds security at the beginning of the development process, can be used to discover domain-specific security requirements through active learning, and can help communicate the complexity of secure development to organizations such that the resources and commitment it requires are better understood. A case study considering the application layer of an Internet of Things system is presented and shows that security-focused prototyping has the potential to facilitate further secure development through the achievement of well-established prototyping objectives, such as communication, active learning, and reduced time/costs. Future work could build on this work by conducting additional case studies to further explore the potential of security-focused prototyping and investigating the importance of fidelity with regards to security-focused prototypes