course

2020 academic semester kickoff

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Today, was the kick-off to the new academic (Spring) semester.  I took the opportunity to present an overview of what is expected to be covered in the Information Security course. During this lecture, I also motivated students why it is important to study information security, introduced the course syllabus, and talked about the learning outcomes of the course.

This year, I have about 150 students taking my course. This is a great achievement especially considering that the course is an elective course. Talking to such large groups is always exciting and fun! You can see me below testing the microphone and preparing my laptop before the students start heading to the class.  All the lectures are delivered in a classroom setting but all the material including slides, supplementary material, and any assignments are uploaded on the course portal.

Getting ready at Malmö university (2020)

In addition to inviting two external academics as guests, this year, I invited two speakers from the industry. The speakers have many years of experience working with real-life security use cases and are working with international companies TrueSec and Fingerprints.

Human-centered AI Course

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In the fall of 2019, I enrolled in the PhD course titled “Introduction to Human-centered AI. ” The course is delivered and managed by Cecilia Ovesdotter Alm from RIT university.

Human-centered AI is essentially a perspective on AI and ML that algorithms must be designed with awareness that they are part of a larger system consisting of human stakeholders. According to Mark O. Riedl,  the main requirements of human-centered AI can be broken into two aspects: (a) AI systems that have an understanding of human sociocultural norms as part of a theory of mind about people, and (b) AI systems that are capable of producing explanations that non-experts in AI or computer science can understand.

Human-centered AI

Course introduction lecture held at Malmö University (2019).

One of the course learning outcomes is to be able to demonstrate critical thinking concerning bias and fairness in data analysis, including but not limited to gender aspects. With regard to this, I have put together a 10 minutes presentation of the article “50 Years of Test (Un)fairness: Lessons for Machine Learning” written by Ben Hutchinson and Margaret Mitchell.

Information Security – Kick-off Lecture

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Yesterday, on 23rd January 2019, I delivered my first lecture (titled: “Course Overview”) between 8:15 am – 10:00 am part of the Information Security course at Malmö University.  This is the third academic year that I am running this exciting course at Bachelor’s level.

Different to the previous years, this time the course material will be published on Canvas (instead of itslearning), officially I am the course responsible, and the amount of students enrolled on this course exceeds 150 students! This is almost double the amount of students I had two years ago! Indeed, this is very satisfying as a tutor to have so many students that recognise the increasing importance of information security!

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Lecture at the “Faculty of Odontology” part of Malmö University.

One of the key points, I mentioned is how the sophistication of attacks is increasing especially since the introduction of Internet of Things (IoT) enabled technologies.

A particular instance of this are attacks being carried out remotely, for instance through the help of drones (war-flying). As a demonstration of this in the clip below, researchers exploit a ZigBee vulnerability (by delivering a malicious Over The Air update) forcing smart Hue light bulbs to flash S.O.S in distress.

What attacks should we expect in the future? Certainly, I would expect to see more of the above and increasingly more autonomous attacks potentially targeting SCADA/ICSs and smart cities causing blackouts and more. Possibly such attacks can be permanent and have irreversible consequences.