Carnegie Mellon Educating Information-Security Experts @ Black & Hispanic Colleges.

Carnegie Mellon University will work with historically black colleges and universities and Hispanic-serving institutions on a program designed to create a next generation of Internet-security experts.

Partners with Carnegie Mellon in the program, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), include Howard University, Morgan State University and the University of Texas at El Paso.

Carnegie Mellon is providing educational resources that will enable Ph.D. computer scientists to teach survey-level courses in information security to advanced undergraduate and first-year graduate students at their universities. The four-week program that began on July 8 and continues through August 2 is being delivered by staff of Carnegie Mellon’s Software Engineering Institute (SEI) and its CERT(R) Coordination Center, the nation’s first and best-known computer emergency response team. Other distinguished faculty members from Carnegie Mellon’s H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management (Heinz School), School of Computer Science, and Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering are also participating.

Stephen E. Cross, director of the Software Engineering Institute, explains that the program will provide the participants with the knowledge and expertise to develop and deliver curricula in information security and will increase the number of Ph.D.-level researchers in information security at historically black colleges and universities and Hispanic-serving
institutions.

“We are very excited to be partnering with these educational institutions,” said Cross. “The training and experiences shared in this program lay the foundation to help create a new generation of Internet-security experts.”

The need for qualified information security personnel and educators is great. A June 1999 Department of Commerce Report, The Digital Workforce, estimates that the U.S. will require more than 1.3 million new highly skilled information technology workers between 1996 and 2006. The National Plan for Information Systems Protection also addresses this critical shortage and further highlights the acute shortage in the number of trained information-security personnel. The National Plan recognizes training and education as key solutions in defending America’s cyberspace.