Penn State researchers receive Best Paper award at the 2020 ASEE conference

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — A group of Penn State researchers led by Swaroop Ghosh, Joseph R. and Janice M. Monkowski Career Development Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Engineering, has been awarded the Electrical and Computer Engineering Division Best Paper award by the American Society for Engineering Education at the 2020 annual conference.

Other researchers who contributed to the paper, “Hands-on cyber security curriculum using a modular training kit,” include Yu Xia, graduate student, and Stephanie Cutler, assistant research professor, both from the Leonhard Center at Penn State. Several graduate and undergraduate students who worked with Ghosh contributed, including Nasim Imtiaz Khan, Mahabubul Alam, Abdullah Ash Saki and Manoj Saripalli, all from electrical engineering; and Asmit De and Karthikeyan Nagarajan, both from computer science and engineering. Ghosh and his College of Engineering students and colleagues also collaborated with researchers in the College of Education, including Taylor Wood, graduate student; Matthew Johnson, assistant professor and research associate of education; Kathleen Mitchell Hill, assistant professor of education and director of the Penn State Center for Science and the Schools; and Annmarie Ward, emerita director of Penn State Center For Science and the Schools.

The paper details the results of the researchers’ work on creating a CyberSecurity Training (CST) kit to advance cybersecurity education in K-12 and higher education, both for students and instructors. Coursework on hardware security using Do-It-Yourself (DIY) training modules from the kit has been piloted to introduce cybersecurity issues and prevention to the graduate students. According to Ghosh, a preliminary survey conducted among students who were introduced to the modular board to learn about hardware security threats shows a 120% improvement in their understanding after the CST kit-based activities. He also said that teachers in a four-day workshop took pre- and post-concept inventories to assess their learning of the content throughout the workshop, and the results indicated an improvement of 58%. 

“We are truly honored to receive this award and grateful to National Science Foundation for funding this project,” Ghosh said. “This work is an extraordinary effort by the graduate and undergraduate students from electrical engineering and computer science and our collaborators from the College of Education and Leonhard Center. This work demonstrates successful integration of our research on hardware security and education and has demonstrated the potential for high impact on graduate and undergraduate students and K-12 teacher learning.”

Ghosh’s research interests include emerging memory technologies, hardware security and quantum computing. He served as associate editor of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Transactions on Circuits and Systems I and IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design, and as senior editorial board member of IEEE Journal of Emerging Topics on Circuits and Systems (JETCAS). He was a guest editor of the IEEE JETCAS and IEEE Transactions on Very-Large-Scale Integration Systems. He has also served in the technical program committees of more than 25 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and IEEE conferences. Ghosh is the recipient of several external and internal awards for research and teaching excellence. He also is a senior member of the IEEE and the National Academy of Inventors, associate member of Sigma Xi and distinguished speaker of the ACM.