Blogs (5) >>
Fri 28 Feb 2025 14:22 - 14:41 at Meeting Rooms 310-311 - Cybersecurity Chair(s): Jingwen Wang

The modern educational landscape faces the challenge of maintaining effective, personalized mentorship amid expanding class sizes. This challenge is particularly pronounced in fields requiring hands-on practice, such as cybersecurity education. Teaching assistants and peer interactions provide some relief, but the student-to-educator ratio often remains high, limiting individualized attention. The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) offers a promising solution by potentially providing scalable and personalized guidance. In this paper, we introduce SENSAI, an AI-powered tutoring system that leverages LLMs to offer tailored feedback and assistance by transparently extracting and utilizing the learner’s working context, including their active terminals and edited files. Over the past year, SENSAI has been deployed in an applied cybersecurity curriculum at a large public R1 university and made available to a broader online community of global learners, assisting 2,742 users with hundreds of educational challenges. In total 178,074 messages were exchanged across 15,413 sessions, incurring a total cost of $1,979–comparable to that of a single undergraduate teaching assistant but with a significantly wider reach. SENSAI demonstrates significant improvements in student problem-solving efficiency and satisfaction, offering insights into the future role of AI in education.

Fri 28 Feb

Displayed time zone: Eastern Time (US & Canada) change

13:45 - 15:00
CybersecurityPapers at Meeting Rooms 310-311
Chair(s): Jingwen Wang Elizabethtown College
13:45
18m
Talk
Enhancing Cybersecurity Education using Scoring Engines: A Practical Approach to Hands-On Learning and FeedbackGlobal
Papers
Christopher Morales-Gonzalez University of Massachusetts Lowell, Mathew Harper University of Massachusetts Lowell, Pranathi Rayavaram University of Massachusetts Lowell, Sashank Narain University of Massachusetts Lowell, Xinwen Fu University of Massachusetts Lowell
14:03
18m
Talk
Improving the Representation of Undergraduate Women in Cybersecurity: A Literature Review
Papers
Ena Selma-Housein Columbia University, Brian Plancher Barnard College, Columbia University
14:22
18m
Talk
SENSAI: Large Language Models as Applied Cybersecurity Tutors
Papers
Connor Nelson Arizona State University, Adam Doupé Arizona State University, Yan Shoshitaishvili Arizona State University
14:41
18m
Talk
Tackling the Gender Gap in Cybersecurity EducationK12
Papers
Gabriele Costa IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca, Silvia De Francisci IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca, Margherita Renieri IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca, Serenella Valiani IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca
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