Outreach & Education

The project outreach goals are to introduce technology professionals to cybersecurity and its central role for our society and economy, and, to introduce K-12 students  (from under-represented minorities and students with exceptional academic potential) to cybersecurity, and through it to computer science in general.

To achieve these goals, the project is:

  • Developing and offering Crypto PROMYS for Teachers (Crypto PfT), an immersive summer training program for high-school teachers in the greater Boston Area. The project is also training a pipeline of teachers to sustain Crypto PfT beyond the 5-year period of the project.
  • Developing and offering a new year-long research internship program for high-school students at BU fashioned after the Program for Research in Mathematics, Engineering, and Science for High School Students (PRIMES) at MIT and focused on cybersecurity applications. The project is also connecting this program with Art for Engineering Mathematics & Science (ARTEMiS) and Women’s Technology Program (WTP) which would act as feeders into CS PRIMES.
  • Developing 16 on-line modules (lectures, labs, and assessment) on the edX platform to be incorporated into existing cybersecurity offerings at BU, MIT, NEU, and UConn; and integrating these modules into a single online professional certification program to be launched by the fifth year of the project.
  • Developing and offering a special outreach program to under-represented minorities in the Holyoke (middle) school system. The program features content for use by teachers ahead of a one-day camp at the MGHPCC facilities, in which students learn by doing. The project is also training teachers to sustain this program.
  • Posting videos of an MIT computer systems security course on YouTube.

In addition, principal investigators continue to pursue existing activities:

  • Curricular development of new courses and seminars at BU, MIT, NEU, and UConn.
  • Participation in summer programs for high-school women and minorities.
  • Support for REU projects and for internships for undergraduate research and training.
  • Participation and engagement with standards bodies such as IETF, Open Stack, etc.
  • Engagement with society and public policy forums through the Cloud Computing Caucus, etc.
  • Organization of events targeting the general public such as Charles River Privacy Day, etc.
  • Organization of bi-annual national workshop on cloud security.
  • Participation in regional events like the Northeast Cyber Infrastructure workshop.

To see some of our lectures and other videos, please visit our Videos Page.