A Bridged Cybersecurity Curriculum with Embedded Stackable Credentials

Supported by a federal grant, The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV) streamlined the Bachelor of Science in Cyber Security (BSCS) and Master of Science in Informatics (MSIN) whereby each degree is broken down into embedded stackable credentials, with a fast-track 4+1 option for students to complete both degrees in 5 years. This paper provides a blueprint of the bridged undergraduate and graduate curriculum integrated to provide embedded stackable credentials with fast-track 4+1 option bridging the two degrees. Most of the major-core of BSCS is divided into three embedded stackable credentials, namely, Cyber Security Basics Certificate, Cyber Security Systems Certificate, and Cyber Security Advanced Certificate. After completing the three credentials, a student needs only 9 hours to complete the major-core for the BSCS degree. Similarly, most of the MSIN is divided into two embedded stackable credentials, namely, Graduate Certificate in Cyber Security and Graduate Certificate in Informatics. After completing the two graduate credentials, a student needs only 6 hours of thesis for the thesis route, or 6 hours of designated electives for the coursework option to earn an MSIN degree. A BSCS student with an overall 3.5 GPA or higher and having a GPA of 3.25 or higher in cyber security benchmark courses, is allowed to opt for the fast-track 4+1 option which allows a student to be simultaneously admitted into the Graduate School to take 12 hours of graduate courses from MSIN degree applicable towards completing BSCS, leaving one year\u27s worth of graduate work to earn an MSIN degree. As part of the grant, the curriculum of BSCS degree is aligned with the national standard of National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education - Workforce Framework for Cybersecurity (NICE-WFC) for the students to have an edge in the job market. The three undergraduate certificates and the two graduate certificates are referred to as embedded stackable credentials since each credential is embedded in its respective degree and serves as a stack towards earning the degree. This approach is advantageous for students since one or more credentials may be earned without completing the respective degree which allows a student to have a few credentials targeted for the job market in case the student needs to take hiatus from education and work for a while. Furthermore, a professional already working in the cyber security or informatics field can earn one or more credentials without committing to complete a degree

Crafting a Degree, Empowering Students, Securing a Nation: The Creation of a Modern Cyber Security Degree for the 21st Century

To create the next generation of skilled university graduates that would help in filling the national need for cybersecurity, digital forensics, and mobile computing professionals, a team of minority/under-represented graduate students, the University Upward Bound Program (a federally funded program and part of the U.S. Department of Education; one of 967 programs nationwide) staff, and faculty from the Computer Science (CS) department got together and proposed a focused 10-week long funded summer camp for two local high schools with the following objectives: 1. Provide graduate students to instruct in the areas of` mobile application development, forensics and cyber Security 2. Provide CS one-on-one mentors for students while conducting their work-based learning experience in Computer Science 3. Assign hands-on interdisciplinary projects that emphasize the importance of STEM fields when using and developing software applications. 4. Promote and develop soft skills among participants including leadership, communications skills, and teamwork. 5. The proposal was funded, and the summer camps were conducted in the summer of 2019 with participation of more than 40 students from two local high schools. 6. The paper will present our efforts in each of the above areas: 7. The criteria/application/selection of high school student based on interest and needs. 8. The criteria/specification for purchased equipment 9. The selection and hiring of graduate students as instructors who can not only teach, but also serve as role models for the incoming students. 10. The development of course material into two parts: foundational material required by everyone, and specialized material where the student selects his/her area of interest. Presented results will show how the summer-camps benefited the students through the focused instruction given by graduate students, and how the students gained valuable knowledge and problem-solving skills in certain STEM fields. 11. The mentorship provided by the CS faculty to the instructors and the students through scheduled visits and agile approach for the software projects assigned. 12. The development of soft skills: how the planned social activities helped in honing the students software skills and allowed them to interact with people from all over the world (through faculty mentorship, conference attendance, project presentation), and prepared them academically and socially for their upcoming university experience. By presenting our study, we hope that other institutions who are considering summer camps can benefit from our experience by adopting best practices while avoiding pitfall

A Holistic Approach for Enhancing Distributed Education with Multi-Campus Course Delivery Methods

To create an emerging research institution, a regional university was created that spans multiple campuses within a radius of more than one hundred miles by merging at least three current institutions. The merge allowed the university to pool its human and technical resources. Students can now pursue new degrees that were not available before at one campus or another, take a newly available technical or specialty courses, and even select their own preferred professor when a course is offered by many faculty. In order to serve students at multiple campuses that are geographically far a part, the university instituted policies to facilitate accessibility of courses to all students while meeting prerequisites and minimum enrollment requirements. This paper chronicles the policies, procedures, and faculty efforts in creating a sustainable framework for implementing a distributed campus course delivery that is acceptable by the university/college administration, the department, the faculty, and most importantly the student. Our experience shows that a successful framework should address many issues, including: - Logistics o Where to offer the courses; one campus, all campuses. o Is transportation provided for student at a convenient time o Etc. - Scheduling o Schedule classes so that student can attend all their classes on-time without conflicts o Coordinate scheduling among campuses - Faculty incentives o Maintain good faculty-to-student ratio o Provide formula for workload computation o Provide teaching/grading assistance o Home campus course Attribution - IT support o Provide Interactive TV with high bandwidth o Allow for faculty-to-student interaction o Provide state-of-the-art class podium o Allow for class recording o Allow for in-office tutorials or Q/A session through collaboration - Course Management System Delivery Methods o Enable many productive tools in the course management system o Allow proper notification for the student - Assessment and student participation o Maintain interaction with student on daily and weekly basis o Compare results from both campuses to avoid any emerging issues. The paper will present our efforts in each of the above areas, showing that despite the challenges faced, a distributed delivery system can be successful when the above issues/factors are adequately addressed. The results from our courses at the graduate and undergraduate levels show that students assessments don’t show any significant difference across campuses or based on where the home campus of the faculty is. By presenting our study, we hope that other institutions who are considering distributed education can benefit from our experience by adopting best practices while avoiding pitfalls

An Accelerated Hierarchical Approach for Object Shape Extraction and Recognition

We present a novel automatic supervised object recognition algorithm based on a scale and rotation invariant Fourier descriptors algorithm. The algorithm is hierarchical in nature to capture the inherent intra-contour spatial relationships between the parent and child contours of an object. A set of distance metrics are introduced to go along with the hierarchical model. To test the algorithm, a diverse database of shapes is created and used to train standard classification algorithms, for shape-labeling. The implemented algorithm takes advantage of the multi-threaded architecture and GPU efficient image-processing functions present in OpenCV wherever possible, speeding up the running time and making it efficient for use in real-time applications. The technique is successfully tested on common traffic and road signs of real-world images, with excellent overall performance that is robust to moderate noise levels

Cybersecurity, Digital Forensics, and Mobile Computing: Building the Pipeline of Next-generation University Graduates through Focused High School Summer Camps

To prepare the next generation of skilled university graduates that would help in filling the national need for cybersecurity, digital forensics, and mobile computing professionals, a team of minority/under-represented graduate students, the University Upward Bound Program (a federally funded program and part of the U.S. Department of Education; one of 967 programs nationwide) staff, and faculty from the Computer Science (CS) department got together and proposed a focused 10-week long funded summer camp for two local high schools with the following objectives: 1. Provide graduate students to instruct in the areas of` mobile application development, forensics and cyber Security. 2. Provide CS one-on-one mentors for students while conducting their work-based learning experience in Computer Science. 3. Assign hands-on interdisciplinary projects that emphasize the importance of STEM fields when using and developing software applications. 4. Promote and develop soft skills among participants including leadership, communications skills, and teamwork. The proposal was funded, by DOE and the summer camps were conducted in the summer of 2019 with participation of more than 40 students from two local high schools. The paper will present our efforts in each of the above areas: 1. The criteria/application/selection of high school student based on interest and needs. 2. The criteria/specification for purchased equipment 3. The selection and hiring of graduate students as instructors who can not only teach, but also serve as role models for the incoming students. 4. The development of course material into two parts: foundational material required by everyone, and specialized material where the student selects his/her area of interest. Presented results will show how the summer-camps benefited the students through the focused instruction given by graduate students, and how the students gained valuable knowledge and problem-solving skills in certain STEM fields. 5. The mentorship provided by the CS faculty to the instructors and the students through scheduled visits and an agile approach for the software projects assigned. 6. The development of soft skills to complement technical one

Infusing Raspberry Pi in the Computer Science Curriculum for Enhanced Learning

With the advent of cloud computing, the Internet of Things (IoT), and mobile computing, CS faculty are continuously revamping the curriculum material to address such burgeoning set of technologies in practical and relatable ways. Raspberry Pi (RPi) devices represent an ideal hardware/software framework that embodies all these technologies through its simple architecture, small form factor (that minimizes the volume and footprint of a desktop computer), and ability to integrate various sensors that network together and connect to the Cloud. Therefore, one of the strategies of Computer Science Department, to enhance depth of learning concepts, has been to infuse Raspberry Pi (RPi) in computer science courses. RPi has been incorporated since 2016 in targeted courses, notably, Computer Organization & Assembly Language, Computer Architecture, Database Management Design & Implementation, Unix/Linux Programming, Internet Programming, and Senior Project. An inexpensive credit card sized computer, an RPi lends itself to allow depth of learning of concepts. From implementing firewalls, intrusion detection systems, scripting, client-server based computing, distributed computing, to interfacing with sensors and actuators, a student is guided to polish concepts taught in a class through RPi Project Based Learning (RPBL). Computer science curriculum already provides breadth of learning. The infusion of RPi in key courses provides depth in targeted concepts. There are peripheral desirable consequences as well, including a student learning prevalently used Linux environment even though a targeted course may have nothing directly to do with Linux. Furthermore, RPi provides an opportunity for students to realize that software programs can be interfaced with sensors and actuators to provide immersed experience in programming. From simply interfacing a switch and a Light Emitting Diode (LED) to getting data from sensors, buffering, and uploading to the cloud, a student already would have touched upon multiple disciplines in computer science. This paper provides a blueprint to infusing RPi in the targeted courses, and how each RPi based project provides depth to a targeted concept

The Majority Rule: A General Protection on Recommender System

Recommender systems are widely used in a variety of scenarios, including online shopping, social network, and contents distribution. As users rely more on recommender systems for information retrieval, they also become attractive targets for cyber-attacks. The high-level idea of attacking a recommender system is straightforward. An adversary selects a strategy to inject manipulated data into the database of the recommender system to influence the recommendation results, which is also known as a profile injection attack. Most existing works treat attacking and protection in a static manner, i.e., they only consider the adversary’s behavior when analyzing the influence without considering normal users’ activities. However, most recommender systems have a large number of normal users who also add data to the database, the effects of which are largely ignored when considering the protection of a recommender system. We take normal users’ contributions into consideration and analyze popular attacks against a recommender system. We also propose a general protection framework under this dynamic setting

Weak Mitoticity of Bounded Disjunctive and Conjunctive Truth-Table Autoreducible Sets

Glaßer et al. (SIAMJCOMP 2008 and TCS 2009 (The two papers have slightly different sets of authors)) proved existence of two sparse sets A and B in EXP, where A is 3-tt (truth-table) polynomial-time autoreducible but not weakly polynomial-time Turing mitotic and B is polynomial-time 2-tt autoreducible but not weakly polynomial-time 2-tt mitotic. We unify and strengthen both of those results by showing that there is a sparse set in EXP that is polynomial-time 2-tt autoreducible but not even weakly polynomial-time Turing mitotic. All these results indicate that polynomial-time autoreducibilities in general do not imply polynomial-time mitoticity at all with the only exceptions of the many-one and 1-tt reductions. On the other hand, however, we proved that every autoreducible set for the polynomial-time bounded disjunctive or conjunctive tt reductions is weakly mitotic for the polynomial-time tt reduction that makes logarithmically many queries only. This shows that autoreducible sets for reductions making more than one query could still be mitotic in some way if they possess certain special properties