Students build a working AI security dashboard and learn a crucial 'defender's mindset' by understanding why no single AI filter is perfect and the necessity of layered defenses.
The AI Cyber-Defense Lab is a specialized, hands-on program where students build AI-powered tools to detect and explain scams and phishing. The curriculum focuses exclusively on defensive AI, emphasizing the development of security tools that protect users rather than creating malicious software. Students will train machine learning models on public message data to automatically flag scams and phishing using both rule-based and machine learning approaches. They will also construct a 'security crew' of four AI agents—Detector, Threat-Explainer, Robustness Reviewer, and Writer—to collaboratively analyze suspicious messages. The lab culminates in building a 3-tab dashboard featuring a Threat Explorer, a detector with a live threshold slider, and a security-brief generator. This program teaches a 'defender's mindset,' highlighting why no single filter is perfect and the importance of layered defenses, providing a project suitable for college applications.
A typical day involves a weekly 2-hour live session that combines short concept briefings with hands-on building activities, where students train scam and phishing detectors and then test their limitations.
This lab is best suited for high school students interested in cybersecurity who want to build defensive AI tools and understand the limitations of automated filters.
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