Education

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Postmaster education: EngD and Long Life Learning

The SCS group actively participates in the Professional Engineering Doctorate (EngD) programme of the University of Twente by supervising some EngD projects of the Business & IT (BIT) EngD programme (https://www.utwente.nl/en/education/tgs/prospective-candidates/engd/programmes/business-and-it/). This programme aims at raising the level of competence of professionals in IT to deal with the opportunities and challenges posed by IT-based innovations. In this multidisciplinary programme, we deliver professionals who understand and design robust and economically sustainable IT-enabled networks, such as social networks, on-line markets, business networks, and public service networks, which balance economic opportunities and online IT risks to attain business goals. The group has been one of the initiators of the BIT EngD  programme and is also strongly related to its management and organisation.

The SCS group also contributes to some Long Life Learning initiatives of the University of Twente, especially in the scope of the collaboration with the municipality of Apeldoorn (see https://www.utwente.nl/en/digital-society/innovation/apeldoorn/).

CyberSecurity

Our cybersecurity education strategy is tightly coupled with our research strategy. We offer fundamental bachelor courses on cybersecurity (ranging from cryptography and data security over software, web and system security, to AI for security) that are mandatory in the computer science bachelor program to provide our students with the basics and to prepare them for more advanced studies. On the master level, we coordinate the 4TU Cybersecurity specialization of our computer science master, which delivers cybersecurity graduates having a T-shaped profile with 2/3 of deep technical knowledge and 1/3 of socio-economic knowledge in cybersecurity. The curriculum is designed in collaboration with our advisory board consisting of senior leaders from industry and government to meet the demands from the real-world. We offer advanced cybersecurity master courses that are tightly coupled with our research, ranging from secure data management, over software and system security, to secure cloud computing and privacy-enhancing technologies. Furthermore, to educate our future cybersecurity innovators and entrepreneurs, we coordinate our participation in the EIT Digital Cybersecurity Master, which puts a particular focus on innovation and entrepreneurship in an international context.

We involve students in our research as much as possible, mostly when they start working on their final projects. We stimulate master projects on real-world challenges in collaboration with our industry partners (for instance through dedicated internships). While our courses in the Master program are mostly targeted towards our Master students, they are offered to our industry partners as well and we offer dedicated educational programs, such as the EngD program, supporting our industry partners in upskilling their current workforce, even when they already have a Master degree in cyber security. While most of our teaching happens on campus, many of our courses allow for remote (online) participation by attending video conferences and live streams and other forms of digital teaching as well.

We aim to make students interested in cybersecurity and particularly in our research as early as possible by supporting and mentoring students in so-called Capture The Flags (CTFs), which are game-based information security competitions aimed at teaching how to identify, exploit, and patch software vulnerabilities, and, as a consequence, how to write secure code. Together with the Twente Hacking Squad (THS), our own CTF team, we organize cyber security workshops to introduce our students to practical security problems. Our students participate in national and international competitions, such as the European Cyber Security Challenge.