Dr. Eman M El-Sheikh

This conference paper was published in the proceedings for CSCE 2024.
This paper describes ongoing research on the use of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) in generating learning objects. Learning Objects are digital or non-digital artifacts, which can be used, re-used or referenced to augment or enhance the learning process. Examples of these are presentation slides, images, text, surveys, quizzes, and hands-on exercises. The unprecedented availability and capability of GenAI tools in recent years brings us to consider how their technical capacities and abilities can bring about effective and useful learning objects. We first explore the published literature to survey work that has been reported in the field of applied GenAI to generate learning objects. Next, we provide a review of their technical features and closely look at the distinctive features of the tools used in various GenAI models. The focus of this research is to develop a method of utilizing freely available GenAI tools to expedite the generation of learning objects and to evaluate their effectiveness. Specifically, we seek to optimize the utilization of these AI-generated learning objects for active-learning applications and learning best practices.

Recent decades have seen a proliferation of cybersecurity guidance in the form of government regulations and standards with which organizations must comply. As society becomes more heavily dependent on cyberspace, increasing levels of security measures will need to be established and maintained to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information. Global Perspectives on Information Security Regulations: Compliance, Controls, and Assurance summarizes current cybersecurity guidance and provides a compendium of innovative and state-of-the-art compliance and assurance practices and tools. It provides a synopsis of current cybersecurity guidance that organizations should consider so that management and their auditors can regularly evaluate their extent of compliance. Covering topics such as cybersecurity laws, deepfakes, and information protection, this premier reference source is an excellent resource for cybersecurity consultants and professionals, IT specialists, business leaders and managers, government officials, faculty and administration of both K-12 and higher education, libraries, students and educators of higher education, researchers, and academicians.
Recent decades have seen a proliferation of cybersecurity guidance in the form of government regulations and standards with which organizations must comply. As society becomes more heavily dependent on cyberspace, increasing levels of security measures will need to be established and maintained to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information. Global Perspectives on Information Security Regulations: Compliance, Controls, and Assurance summarizes current cybersecurity guidance and provides a compendium of innovative and state-of-the-art compliance and assurance practices and tools. It provides a synopsis of current cybersecurity guidance that organizations should consider so that management and their auditors can regularly evaluate their extent of compliance. Covering topics such as cybersecurity laws, deepfakes, and information protection, this premier reference source is an excellent resource for cybersecurity consultants and professionals, IT specialists, business leaders and managers, government officials, faculty and administration of both K-12 and higher education, libraries, students and educators of higher education, researchers, and academicians.

The innovations in the interconnectivity of vehicles enable both expediency and insecurity. Surely, the convenience of gathering real-time information on traffic and weather conditions, the vehicle maintenance status, and the prevailing condition of the transport system at a macro level for infrastructure planning purposes is a boon to society. However, this newly found conveniences present unintended consequences. Specifically, the advancements on automation and connectivity are outpacing the developments in security and safety. We simply cannot afford to make the same mistakes similar to those that are prevalent in our critical infrastructures. Starting at the lowest level, numerous vulnerabilities have been identified in the internal communication network of vehicles. This study is a contribution towards the broad effort of securing the communication network of vehicles through the use of Machine Learning.

Our ever-increasing dependence on information technology brings us to new crossroads and challenges confronting national security protection. Both private and public entities recognized these issues and are currently making progress toward addressing the problems of cybersecurity. A major component of cybersecurity, or any technical program, is effective training that could alleviate, if not eliminate, the threat imposed by the adversarial entities.
Training programs are guided by learning processes that could utilize passive and active learning strategies. While passive learning incorporates rote learning, active learning places more responsibility to students by engaging them in problem-based or case-based learning processes. The student is presented with interactive scenarios which facilitate the progression of the student toward a solution to the problem. In following the storyline, the students apply their acquired domain knowledge and critical thinking skills while receiving constructive feedback based on the decisions that they have made (Massey University of New Zealand, 2020).
Recognizing these needs, we initiated an innovative cybersecurity training and education project with the following objectives: to design, develop, test, and deploy a highly interactive, automated, and intelligent cybersecurity scenario builder and retrieval software toolkit for active cybersecurity learning; to build a virtual machine (VM) that will accompany each scenario; and to facilitate the deployment of the scenarios on a cyber range. Each scenario will be created using our novel concept: Open Virtualization Scenario.

With the advance of technology, Criminal Justice agencies are being confronted with an increased need to investigate cybercrimes perpetrated partially or entirely over the Internet. In order to conceal illegal online activity, criminals often use private browsing features or browsers designed to provide complete private browsing. The use of private browsing is a common challenge faced in, for example, child exploitation investigations, which usually originate on the Internet. Although private browsing features are not designed specifically for criminal activity, they have become a valuable tool for criminals looking to conceal their online activity. Private browsing features and browsers often require a more in-depth, post-mortem analysis. This often requires the use of multiple tools, as well as different forensic approaches to uncover incriminating evidence. This evidence may be required in a court of law, where analysts are often challenged both on their findings and on the tools and approaches used to recover evidence. However, there are very few research studies on forensic acquisition and analysis of privacy preserving Internet browsers. Therefore in this chapter, we firstly review the private mode of popular Internet browsers. Next, we describe the forensic acquisition and analysis of Browzar, a privacy preserving Internet browser.

The digital transformation of our society changes the way we live, work, learn, communicate, and collaborate. The digitization of software-intensive products and services is enabled basically by four megatrends: Cloud Computing, Big Data Mobile Systems, and Social Technologies. This disruptive change interacts with all information processes and systems that are important business enablers for the current digital transformation. The Internet of Things, Social Collaboration Systems for Adaptive Case Management, Mobility Systems and Services for Big Data in Cloud Services environments are emerging to support intelligent user-centered and social community systems. Modern enterprises see themselves confronted with an ever growing design space to engineer business models of the future as well as their IT support, respectively. The decision analytics in this field becomes increasingly complex and decision support, particularly for the development and evolution of sustainable enterprise architectures (EA), is duly needed. With the advent of intelligent user-centered and social community systems, the challenging decision processes can be supported in more flexible and intuitive ways. Tapping into these systems and techniques, the engineers and managers of the enterprise architecture become part of a viable enterprise, i.e. a resilient and continuously evolving system that develops innovative business models.

The evolution of Services Oriented Architectures (SOA) presents many challenges due to their complex, dynamic and heterogeneous nature. We describe how SOA design principles can facilitate SOA evolvability and examine several approaches to support SOA evolution. SOA evolution approaches can be classified based on the level of granularity they address, namely, service code level, service interaction level and model level. We also discuss emerging trends, such as microservices and knowledge-based support, which can enhance the evolution of future SOA systems.

The University of West Florida (UWF) is a relatively young institution, founded in 1967 as an upper-level institution enrolling juniors, seniors, and graduate students. The university became a full 4-year undergraduate institution and admitted its first class of freshmen in 1983. A significant number of undergraduate students transfer to UWF after beginning their studies elsewhere; nearly 50% of students who graduate with a bachelor's degree from UWF matriculate with an A.A. The university admitted the first cohort of graduate students in an Ed.D. program in 1996. The university currently enrolls approximately 11,200 students. This enrollment allows for relatively small class sizes (the average class enrollment is 25 students). The student population is drawn largely from Florida (89% of students are Florida residents, and 11 % are non-Florida residents), although the student population includes students from all 50 states and 92 countries. Approximately 23% of UWF students identify themselves as members of a cultural/ethnic minority group.