NSF Award
2131260
This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).<br/><br/>This project brings together researchers from seven Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and three National Research Laboratories (NRLs) to develop the AI-CyS research partnership at the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and cybersecurity. Cybersecurity vulnerabilities are growing at a scale and speed that strains human capacity to proactively address threats; developing AI and machine learning (ML) techniques to support prediction and detection capabilities is thus an important area of research. The HBCUs involved in AI-CyS either already have or are rapidly developing cybersecurity research capacity that would be further developed by increasing student and faculty involvement and training. To develop that potential, the project team will leverage its existing research activities and collaborations to deepen relationships with both other HBCUs and with the NRLs. The NRLs will provide additional research resources and mentoring through both regular remote meetings and on-site visits to the NRLs around projects of mutual interest, and opportunities for student internships and faculty visits at the NRLs. The team will also work to expand the impact of the partnership by (a) hosting an annual research conference to bring researchers together across the partners, (b) adding additional research projects, HBCUs and national lab partners with complementary research and educational interests to the existing partnership, and (c) developing cross-university curricula and mentoring programs to train HBCU students to be future research and workforce leaders in cybersecurity. Together, these efforts will advance research in cybersecurity, research capacity at the partner institutions, and research and educational opportunities for students at HBCUs, who are often members of underrepresented groups in computing. <br/><br/>The partnership will be organized around five seed research projects chosen to maximize existing capacity and collaborations. The first will use reinforcement learning to improve target selection by current autonomous network mapping software agents. The second involves analyzing network traceroute data to better understand and work around limitations of its ability to map paths in order to better detect and classify network anomalies. The third focuses on developing, then defending against, adversarial attacks on computer vision algorithms in which attackers add visual patches to objects to fool object detection and classification tools. The fourth will analyze existing tools and algorithms for generating “deepfake” videos to develop methods to detect forged video in near real-time, with applications to surveillance and authentication tasks. The fifth will extend probabilistic sequential models to develop threat detectors at multiple levels of the network stack in the context of Internet of Things devices. Beyond these specific seed research projects, the project team will also analyze its activities to develop evidence-based best practices for research capacity-building efforts. These efforts will include developing mechanisms to expand current collaborations and foster resources, sharing expertise between HBCU members, and hosting an annual research conference that allows faculty and students from both current and potential partner HBCUs to showcase their cybersecurity research and create connections to other researchers and resources.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
