In addition to the undergraduate projects supported by ACTION at UC Santa Barbara, Norfolk State University and Rutgers University were bustling with summer internships.
Norfolk State University's 2024 Summer Research Program, run by the NSU College of Science, Engineering, and Technology, saw more than 40 young scientists participating in courses on ethics in research, technical writing, and professional development. Specific to ACTION, Dr. Tonya Fields advised two undergraduate students, Wendon Doswell and Clay Jones, in a project incorporating NLP techniques for creating LLMs. The poster for this work can be viewed at this link.
Dr. Fields and Dr. Hoppa co-advised another student, Korey Bailey, on a project considering the implications of ChatGPT for Cybersecurity. They submitted the resulting paper to CFP: Artificial Intelligence + Data Science. (CSCI'24 Conference: Dec. 11-13, 2024; Las Vegas, USA).
Dr. Jules Chenou, a research scientist in the NSU's Cybersecurity Complex mentored an undergraduate, Jasmine McDuffie, in a project titled "Self-Adaptive Petri Net for Detection of Malware Intrusion." Jasmine writes, "I furthered my understanding of Petri net markings, reachability, and net configurations. I also learned more syntax rules. I practiced marking graphs on Petri Nets... I found different Petri Net simulators, built Petri Nets in them, and learned how to build Petri Nets using Python." Jasmine provided a technical report and made an enthusiastic promise to build on her efforts with future research.
Dr. Chenou also advised an NSU graduate student, Timothy Agboada, in a project that studies an intrusion detection system for identifying and mitigating potential cyber attacks against a cyber-physical system. In this project, Agboada and Chenou use UPPAAL to model the autonomous braking systems of vehicles, with hopes of providing a framework for enhancing and improving the safety of the systems. A manuscript describing their study is in development.
Full abstracts for the summer research can be found at the NSU Summer Experience Page. In Summer 2025, the ACTION Institute anticipates expanding the summer internship program even further. Please reach out if you are interested in participating. Find more information on our Education and Outreach page.