(FOA)-Dear
Colleague Letter: Cybersecurity Education in the Age of Artificial
Intelligence; May 15, 2020
The
National Science Foundation (NSF) is announcing its intention to fund a small
number of Early Concept Grants for Exploratory Research (EAGER) to encourage
advances in cybersecurity education, an area supported by the Foundation's
Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace Education Designation (SaTC-EDU), CyberCorps®:
Scholarships for Service, and Advanced Technological Education (ATE)
programs
EAGER
is a mechanism to support exploratory work, in its early stages, on untested
but potentially transformative research ideas or approaches. This work may be
considered especially "high risk – high payoff" in the sense that it, for
example, involves radically different approaches, applies new expertise, or
engages novel disciplinary or interdisciplinary
perspectives.
Basic
research in AI together with research on cybersecurity education might expand
existing AI opportunities and resources in cybersecurity education and
workforce development. Education efforts are needed to foster workforce
knowledge and skills about applying AI expertise to cybersecurity as well as
building robust and trustworthy AI. This DCL seeks to promote exploration of
possible partnerships between AI researchers, cybersecurity researchers, and
education researchers in order to inspire novel education and outreach efforts.
Such collaborative efforts could also foster a robust workforce with integrated
AI and cybersecurity competencies, and develop an informed public that
understands the privacy, confidentiality, ethics, safety, and security
implications of AI.
Responses
to this DCL will be handled as a two-step process:
Step
1: Teams are required to send a research concept outline, including project
title, team members, institutions involved, and a summary of the project
concept (up to two pages) by email to satc-edu@nsf.gov.
Two rounds of submissions are available with the deadline for the first round at
midnight EDT on May 15, 2020, and for the second round at midnight
EDT on August 31, 2020. To ensure proper processing, please begin
the proposal title as well as the subject line of your initial email with:
"EAGER: SaTC AI-Cybersecurity". NSF Program
directors will review these research concept outlines and will invite the
authors of those of most interest to submit full EAGER
proposals.
Step
2: Those who have been invited will submit their EAGER proposal for
review.
Link
to Full Announcement
https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2020/nsf20072/nsf20072.jsp?WT.mc_id=USNSF_25&WT.mc_ev=click
Contact
Information
Li
Yang, James Joshi, and Nigamanth
Sridhar
SaTC
program directors