Zinta S. Byrne - US grants

This interdisciplinary project studies the nature of the risks inherent in normal activity on the Internet, the perception of those risks, the judgment about trade-offs in behavior and the design of a personalized agent that can alert users to risky behavior and help to protect them. The key insight is that adequate security and privacy protection requires the concerted efforts of both the computer and the user. The interdisciplinary research team combines expertise from psychology, computer security and artificial intelligence to propose MIPA (MIxed Initiative Protective Agent) -- a semi-autonomous, intelligent and personalized agent approach that leverages psychological studies of what users want/need and what security and privacy risks are imminent. The techniques will be developed for and tested on a real problem that challenges the current state of the art in artificial intelligence, security and user models.

As it is becoming increasingly difficult for users to protect themselves and understand the risks they are taking on the Internet, this project has the potential to positively impact system design to effectively enhance user security. Focusing on home computer users (college students and senior citizens), the proposed research will investigate how they perceive, use and can best be served by Internet application software. Results could improve the experiences of these users as well as significantly advance techniques in intelligent agents and computer security. Additionally, because home users and machines tend to be the weak link in security, protecting them may better protect others.

The current engineering educational system fails in two fundamentally critical ways. First, students who have the desire and aptitude to become accomplished and productive engineers are abandoning the discipline in startling numbers. Second, students who graduate are frequently not prepared for the realities of their chosen profession and are switching careers at alarming rates. A team of educators at Colorado State University propose a new organizational model that looks at the undergraduate electrical and computer engineering (ECE) degree as an integrated system, breaking down the barriers inherent in higher education structures and implementing novel pedagogical approaches that allow students of all backgrounds to see the utility of their knowledge and connections to professional practice. At the pedagogical level, the new approach combines rigor and flexibility in engineering education to improve student efficacy and content knowledge integration through building communities of learning and practice. At the organizational level, the transformational approach aims to energize faculty to collaboratively weave important knowledge and application threads throughout the curriculum, while utilizing a new learning model that connects disparate anchoring concepts. Whether demonstrating the relevance of content through research, labs, or hands-on projects, the ECE faculty will work as a multifaceted team, ensuring that every educational component gives consideration to the big picture, while simultaneously instilling a deep knowledge of the discipline. Colorado State's approach is expected to reverse the attrition trend in engineering education and fill the engineering pathway with motivated students of diverse backgrounds. These students will have the mastery of fundamental engineering knowledge, while being ready and excited to apply their knowledge to real-world applications. The pedagogical and organizational innovations provide a broad framework for transformative and sustainable changes in engineering departments, which are necessary to produce professional engineers of the future. Moreover, the approach builds a community of universities, community colleges, and industry partners for wide participation of effective teaching and learning. CSU's approach will propel a new engineering workforce that generates superior ideas, products, and services, ultimately contributing to the nation's economic vitality and global competitiveness.

Colorado State's proposed model incorporates transformative innovation in engineering education that yields an inclusive environment that is characterized by rigor and flexibility. The new approach utilizes learning studios with modules that build on the concept of "nanocourses" and emphasizes knowledge integration - which is a learning model that is well grounded in pedagogy and supported by education research. CSU's efforts will span the entire undergraduate electrical and computer engineering experience, with special attention to the critical technical core of the middle two years. While area-specific learning modules have been in existence for years, such modules are usually supplements to the core curriculum and do not typically cover fundamental subjects vital to comprehending abstract topics; nor do they stitch together anchoring concepts to lay the groundwork for real-world applications. Key to the new approach is its: latitudinal knowledge integration, which will be used to link fundamental concepts and illustrate the utility of topics using applications students are familiar with (e.g., the smartphone, digital camera, and high-speed internet), consonant with research recommendations from the cognitive sciences. Furthermore, the pedagogical innovation of the new approach is accompanied by organizational redefinition of roles within an engineering department - based on established behavioral science principles coupled with rigorous evaluations and research methods specifically developed for this project. The research findings will advance theoretical development of engineering education and organizational development frameworks, while also providing practical case-study examples of change interventions for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. Furthermore, successful porting of organizational science principles to higher education may provide validity evidence that higher education can be compared to other organizations, such as those found in private industry.