Project Grant 2416990

This Project Grant award for $295,000 from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) program (CFDA 47.070) to Tennessee Technological University aims to train the future research workforce to develop and use AI-based cybersecurity solutions for cloud infrastructure that are fair, ethical, and unbiased. The project will develop and integrate seven advanced experiential learning modules, referred to as AI4SecureCI, into undergraduate and graduate curricula, directly training around 500 diverse participants including faculty and students. The modules will cover topics like network security, authorization, malware detection, adversarial attacks, bias, and explainable AI, providing both conceptual knowledge and hands-on lab exercises using public security datasets and cloud services. The project will also conduct student boot-camps and faculty workshops to enable broader adoption of the AI4SecureCI and computational data-driven methods, especially for underrepresented groups of cloud infrastructure users and contributors. All project materials and advances will be made publicly available.