End of Semester 2025 Semester
09 May 2025Regular classes for the Spring 2025 semester are over. We’re about to head into Finals Week, and then the summer. This is a good time to look back.
This year marked the second year of me being Chair of Department. The first year was a bit of a transition shock; we were dealing with a rapidly growing program and I had to pull out quite a few tricks to staff courses. This year was a bit better, but finding instructors for all the course sections we needed to run was still tricky.
In the end, to make it all work, I ended up teaching way too much again. Hopefully, that will be better in the 2025/2026 academic year. We are seeing a bit of a turnaround; the unrestricted growth of the computer science field is definitely over for now and we’re seeing quite a bit of a decline for next year. International students are also not chopping at the bit to come study in the U.S., so that’s a double whammy.
Working together with Sung Kim and Chris Benson, we authored a paper on the research we conducted last summer. The paper will be presented at the European Conference of Cyber Warfare in Kaiserslautern in Germany in a few weeks. Given the workload, I didn’t get to do much research this year.
I did have the pleasure of working with an Honors College student on her undergraduate thesis. Joshanna will defend her work on phishing attacks targetting undergraduate students at U.S. colleges on Monday.
However, even though I haven’t been able to get much research done this year, we were able to put a lot of effort towards new curriculum development. During the academic year, we were able to approve and launch two new programs (a B.S. and an M.S.) in Artificial Intelligence.
Our department has a broad interest in mathematics, statistics, and computer science. AI is positioned at the intersection of these three fields, and several of our faculty members are established scholars in this field.
We have not launched this program earlier because market studies indicated that there would not be enough student interest to generate sufficient enrollment to run the program consistently. With the rapid adoption of generative AI, that has changed, and we took this opportunity to carefully design, develop, and lauch the programs. We aere looking to our first intake in the Fall.
What’s next? We’ll hold our Commencement ceremonies immediately following finals week, and then there will be some travel this summer. In early June, I’ll trek up to the Finger Lakes region of New York State to attend the New York CIO Conference. Its theme this year seems to heavily rely on the intersection between AI and cybersecurity. Perfect for me! Afterwards, a trip to Germany to present the paper.
Once back, I’ll work with my team in IT to update our cybersecurity plans to align with version 2.0 of the NIST Cybersecurity Framework, we’ll continue our onboarding of multifactor authentication across the board, update our VPN strategy and update the infrastructure to implement it, decide on an email filtering platform, onboard a new platform for course planning, registration, degree audit, and degree clearance, and do some other random stuff.
All and all, it won’t be a boring summer :-) I might even get some research done!