Educating the educated, using AI to provide cyber security education to researchers

Engaging with researchers for corporate education purposes is challenging. They are time poor and already have to maintain lifelong education in their chosen field(s). Combined with an ever-growing governance workload, where there always seems to be another mandatory online learning course to complete, engaging researchers with topics like cyber-security requires a creative approach.

Traditional cyber security education is focused on corporate activities, which is very different from the activities that researchers usually carry out. Mandatory courses generally completely miss the target and are completed to tick the box with no real educational outcomes.

AI offers a unique opportunity to engage researchers in a way that can work with their natural curiosity and desire to succeed so that they genuinely engage with the content and learn.

Our approach is to co-develop an AI chatbot trained on cyber security information that is pertinent to researchers. This system allows researchers to “choose their own adventure” while being presented with content that is relevant to them by a system that can present the content in as many different ways as they need to understand it. A basic scoring system provides feedback to the researchers on their current progress and the other topics available to learn about so the researchers are able to go as deep as they choose on one topic while being motivated to explore the others that the organisation wants them to learn about.

This talk will cover the challenges that we were attempting to overcome by building this tool, the development process and lessons learned along the way.