USENIX ASE 2016

• security
• education
• USENIX

I'm very pleased to announce the USENIX board has accepted our proposal to organize the Workshop for Advances in Security Education (ASE), to be held August 9th, 2016, co-located with USENIX Security, in Austin, TX.

ASE will be an expansion and rebranding of 3GSE, a workshop on the use of games for security education I helped co-found. The core mission of this new workshop will be the dissemination and catalyst of cutting-edge computer security education research, more broadly, including:

• Novel pedagogical approaches
• Diversity & Outreach Efforts
• Tools and Techniques for Evaluation and Assessment
• Frameworks and infrastructures supporting education
• Experiences with Standards, Certifications & Accreditation
• Games & Competitions
• Extramural and extracurricular education programs
• MOOCs, inverted classrooms, distance learning
• Security education geared toward non-technical audiences

So why organize ASE? Through two very successful offerings of 3GSE I and co-founded, Mark Gondree, made three consequential conclusions: 1) there’s tremendous value in a dedicated workshop for security education: it catalyzes interdisciplinary research, fosters new collaborations, and generally advances the state of the art in the design, deployment, and assessment of pedagogical approaches in security education; 2) while we’ve had two very successful 3GSE programs, Mark and I have expressed concerns that running 3GSE annually may be unsustainable, due largely in part to the relatively small size of the academic security gaming community and the methodical pace at which education research must be conducted (e.g. courses or competitions tend to be offered annually); 3) 3GSE unnecessarily excludes a wide body of interesting and important security education research because it may not squarely fit into a “games” theme. This is a both a disservice to the security gaming community, and the security community more broadly, which has seen an explosion in interest and funding (by the National Science Foundation and Department of Homeland Security, among others).

By broadening our scope, we hope to not only attract those already working in this space within the USENIX Security community, but also those from outside of the technical communities, including education researchers, social psychologists, and practitioners.

We're very excited about this development, and are looking forward to seeing how it develops.