As the next programme director of UCL’s MSc in Information Security, I have quickly realized that showcasing a group’s educational and teaching activities is no trivial task.
As academics, we learn over the years to make our research “accessible” to our funders, media outlets, blogs, and the likes. We are asked by the REF to explain why our research outputs should be considered world-leading and outstanding in their impacts. As security, privacy, and cryptography researchers, we repeatedly test our ability to talk to lawyers, bankers, entrepreneurs, and policy makers.
But how do you do good outreach when it comes to postgraduate education? Well, that’s a long-standing controversy. The Economist recently dedicated a long report on tertiary education and also discussed misaligned incentives in strategic decisions involving admissions, marketing, and rankings. Personally, I am particularly interested in exploring ways one can (attempt to) explain the value and relevance of a specialist masters programme in information security. What outlets can we rely on and how do we effectively engage, at the same time, current undergraduate students, young engineers, experienced professionals, and aspiring researchers? How can we shed light on our vision & mission to educate and train future information security experts?
So, together with my colleagues of UCL’s Information Security Group, I started toying with the idea of organizing events — both in the digital and the analog “world” — that could provide a better understanding of both our research and teaching activities. And I realized that, while difficult at first and certainly time-consuming, this is a noble, crucial, and exciting endeavor that deserves a broad discussion.
Information Security: Trends and Challenges
Thanks to the great work of Steve Marchant, Sean Taylor, and Samantha Webb (now known as the “S3 team” :-)), on March 31st, we held what I hope is the first of many MSc ISec Open Day events. We asked two of our friends in industry — Alec Muffet (Facebook Security Evangelist) and Dr Richard Gold (Lead Security Analyst at Digital Shadows and former Cisco cloud web security expert) — and two of our colleagues — Prof. Angela Sasse and Dr David Clark — to give short, provocative talks about what they believe trends and challenges in Information Security are. In fact, we even gave it a catchy name to the event: Information Security: Trends and Challenges.