Prof. Paul A. Watters
Title: Cyber Security Knowledge, Skills and Abilities: Designing Digital Education for the 21st Century
Bio:
Professor Watters is Australia’s leading cybersecurity researcher, and founder of the 100pointcybercheck.com.
He was recently awarded $2.364m from the MBIE Catalyst Strategic – Cyber Security Research by the New Zealand government to develop Artificial Intelligence for Automating Responses to Threats. This collaboration includes Data61, Victoria University of Wellington and the University of Queensland.
He has also recently been awarded funding from the Oceania Cyber Security Centre (OCSC) for six projects:
- Automated Story Generation for Intelligible Cyber Incident Response Handling (with funding from Cisco) $253k
- Spam Email Categorisation Using Natural Language Processing and Attention-Embedded Deep Learning (with funding from Westpac) $160k
- Adaptive API Security Using Artificial Intelligence (with funding from Aiculus) $139k
- Real-time Zero Day Ransomware Attack Detection $79k
- A Multi-Layered Approach to Detecting Malicious Mobile Advertising $78k
- Development of Smart Grid Cyber Security Testbed $69k
Professor Watters also holds Australian Research Council (Discovery DP160100601) Auto-Internet Warnings to Prevent the Viewing of Minor-Adult Sex Images ($299k) and a grant from the Australian Centre for Combating Child Exploitation (ACCCE) for Automated Internet Warning to Prevent the Uploading of Child Exploitation Material $120k.
Professor Watters has previously worked at CSIRO, Macquarie University, the University of Ballarat, and Massey University, and has held honorary positions at University College London and Unitec New Zealand. He has received research funding from the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering (ATSE), Department of Social Services, Metrix Ltd, Callaghan Innovation, the Motion Picture Association, CASBAA, 21st Century Fox, the Attorney General’s Department, Village Roadshow, the Australian Federal Police, IBM, Westpac, Google Inc the National Australia Bank, and End Child Prostituion and Trafficking (ECPAT).
Professor Watters collaborates with researchers at Data61 (Dr Surya Nepal, Dr Seyit Camtepe, Dr Shiping Chen, Dr Marthie Grobler), Massey University (A/Prof Julian Jang-Jaccard), the University of Tasmania (A/Prof Jeremy Prichard and Dr Caroline Spiranovic), University College London (Professor Richard Wortley), University of Canberra (Dr Tony Krone), Federation University (Prof Iqbal Gondal), Macquarie University (Dr Stephen McCombie and Dr Allon Uhlmann), Indiana University (Prof Bennett Bertenthal, Prof L Jean Camp), Stanford University (Prof Lawrence Fung) and Curtin University (Prof Tele Tan, Prof Sonya Girdler). His current industry collaborators hail from Noblis (Dr Ebrima Ceesay), Mitre (Ms Teresa Thomas), DXC (Prof Michael Fieldhouse), Untapped Group (Mr Andrew Eddy), the Anti-Phishing Working Group (Mr Peter Cassidy) and Aiculus (Dr Omaru Maruatona).
Professor Watters leads the Digital Crime and Networking Group at La Trobe, working closely with Dr ASM Kayes, Dr Alex Ng, Dr Richard Skarbez and Professor Phoebe Chen.
Abstract:
Following the COVID emergency, digital education and e-learning has become a mainstream part of daily life for students globally. At the same time, there are numerous security issues that arise from an unplanned and large-scale movement to online learning. In this talk, I will discuss fundamental issues in the security of digital learning, and relate how curricula and pedagogy may need to be reframed in the post-COVID world.