Artificial Intelligence, the Internet-of-Things, and Cybersecurity

In this course, we review use cases and challenges of three interrelated areas in computer science: cybersecurity (cyber), artificial intelligence (AI), and the internet-of-things (IoT). Students gain an overview of the possibilities and challenges of building complex information systems that take advantage of recent advances in these fields. Although the course covers three distinct areas, the emphasis is to have each student develop a personal toolkit of analytic approaches that can be used to analyze and understand problems in these or any other area at the leading edge of applied computer science. Students gain an understanding of what is possible today, what is likely to be delivered from research labs and into production within the next three years, and what is almost certainly science fiction. The course begins with a full-stack introduction to the computer science ecosystem, starting with the fundamentals of digital computers and computation, modern system architectures, the technology supply ecosystem, funding mechanisms, customers, and the impact of governments and mega-corporations. Students learn how to find and understand the research literature of computer science. Next, this course explores how cybersecurity is a constant issue that must be addressed at every level of the stack; to do this, the course uses a combination of first principles and a case-study approach. The second part surveys state-of-the-art topics in designing AI products and services. The focus of this part of the course is to understand AI's rapidly evolving frontier. It covers the history and likely future directions of research, including the 50-year tension between symbolic and connectionist (neural network) approaches to AI, the AI hype cycle, knowledge representation, computer vision, reinforcement learning, and deep learning. Topics in this first section also include existing hurdles for successful AI design such as explainability, visualization, and adversarial attacks. The third part of the course looks at the IoT. While the promise of the IoT brings many new business opportunities, it also presents significant challenges including architectural choices, security concerns, moral challenges, and the potential for social upheaval. This part of the course offers approaches for identifying important choices facing designers—for example, the engineering and business tradeoffs between using AI at the edge or in the cloud. By the end of the course students come to appreciate that cyber, AI, and IoT all seem like different things, and indeed are all being researched and practiced by different groups, but that success in both the marketplace and in the competition between the great powers requires mastery of all three, because they are really all aspects of using machine computation for human advantage.