2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Board 289: From Logs to Learning: Applying Machine Learning to Instructor Intervention in Cybersecurity Exercises

Presented at NSF Grantees Poster Session

Hands-on exercises provide students with practical skills and abilities. However, for exercises to be effective, students may need timely feedback while they are engaged to prevent them from getting stuck or frustrated. The goal of this project is to use machine learning to help identify such students such that timely and contextually appropriate hints can be given.

We are building a system that identifies students who are potentially in the most need of help, and suggests hints that the instructor could provide. The instructor can reject hints that they do not find appropriate. The hint system will be integrated into the EDURange cybersecurity education platform and will also be compatible with other platforms.

We are collecting data that will be analyzed to determine the efficacy of the tool, and to develop new hints and strategies for helping students. This project plans to use our machine learning system to create, test, and deploy semi-automated hints in a timely manner.

Authors

Aubrey Nicholas Birdwell Georgia Institute of Technology [biography]

Aubrey Birdwell is currently pursuing a Master's degree in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and previously completed a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science at The Evergreen State College. His research is focused on computing education, particularly in the domain of cybersecurity. Aubrey has worked extensively on developing an application aimed at teaching cybersecurity content. This project explores data processing and the application of machine learning techniques to provide dynamic hints, evaluate user progress, and enhance learning through visualization.
Jack Cook The Evergreen State College [biography]

Lead Developer for the EDURange cybersecurity training platform.
Dr. Richard S Weiss The Evergreen State College [biography]

Richard Weiss is currently a Member of the Faculty at The Evergreen State College and has been teaching security and information assurance since 2003. He received an A.B. in mathematics from Brandeis University and a Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard University.
Dr. Jens Mache Lewis & Clark College [biography]

Jens Mache is an educator and researcher at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon.

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