RET Site: Applied Data Science for Cyber Security

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This award creates a new Research Experiences for Teachers (RET) Site focused on data science and cybersecurity at the Texas Tech University. Each summer, ten high school science and mathematics teachers will participate in summer research activities with faculty in labs at Texas Tech University. The teachers will be recruited from the area served by the Texas Educational Service Center Region 17, which includes the city of Lubbock and the surrounding rural areas. Cyber security is important for many technical applications as well as for the daily lives of most citizens. Teachers in this site will apply fundamental data science techniques and learn basic cyber security principles while investigating real world problems involving cybersecurity. The participating teachers will translate their research experiences and knowledge into classroom practice by developing instructional modules and course materials that they will introduce in their classrooms and share with other teachers in their school districts. Thus students and teachers should become much more aware of the challenges of cybersecurity and how they can act responsibly and safely in the cyber connected world they live in. These activities all contribute to the formation of a community of practice in partnership with Texas Tech faculty mentors that has the potential to significantly enhance Science/Technology/Engineering/Math (STEM) education in the participating school districts. This award is co-funded by the Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) program.RET participants will participate in cutting-edge research projects with state-of-the-art data science tools and techniques in cyber security. The teachers will work with a team of experienced faculty from the Department of Computer Science on projects focusing on data science and its application in authentic settings. The teachers will be introduced to the data science pipeline of data collection, feature engineering, data cleaning, and model building, before applying this knowledge to solve problems on a range of topics including biometrics, user authentication, network traffic anomaly detection, and mobile device security and privacy. These projects have the potential to impact the field of cybersecurity itself as well as to bring important topics and techniques to high school teachers and their students.