Taylor Cybersecurity Students Attend CERIAS Symposium 2018

Eight students from Taylor University's Department of Computer Science and Engineering attended the 19th annual CERIAS Security Symposium last week at Purdue University. The team was led by Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering Dr. Dannie Stanley, who earned his PhD at Purdue in 2013.

"I was heavily involved with CERIAS (Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Safety), so the trip was both highly relevant to our students and a good chance for me to reconnect with cybersecurity colleagues," Stanley said.

Symposium presenters and panelists are cybersecurity experts from academia, industry, and government. The topics range widely from technical to policy to social. "At Taylor, we focus on the computer science aspects of cybersecurity (our major is primarily a computer science degree)," Stanley explained. "The symposium gives students an opportunity to put the bytes and algorithms into the broader security context—learn the lingo, what is important today, how we arrived in the current situation, the state of the art, and who’s who in cybersecurity."

Stanley added in addition to cybersecurity, students were exposed to graduate school-level research. "I don’t expect all of our graduates to continue on to graduate school. However, I like for them to have an accurate picture of what it might be like," he said. "Often students find research that is interesting to them and within their grasp, which helps demystify postgraduate work."