2017 Academic Leadership of the Year
For 15 years, Wenliang (Kevin) Du has labored to create an educational ecosystem for teaching cyber security. The result has been the SEED labs and community of interest, extending to several hundred colleges and universities worldwide.
Kevin had two insights: (1) that many institutions did not have the resources to create their own labs to teach basic concepts, and (2) that security concepts can (and should) be taught across the spectrum of CS courses; good cyber security is not simply something in and of itself, but should be a component of databases, operating systems, application development, and more. As a result of these insights, Kevin has constructed a corpus of 30 self contained labs illustrating basic cyber security concepts that can easily be integrated into existing courses across the CS curriculum. Each lab has a fully documented set of tasks, supporting material, and a configured VM that makes installation and use simple in most environments.
Also with the set of labs, Kevin has written textbooks and tutorials, and developed an ongoing set of workshops to train faculty in how to use and extend the existing SEED labs. The result has been a global community of teachers who have presented these security concepts to literally tens of thousands of students over the years, making a huge impact in education.
More on the SEED project may be found here: http://www.cis.syr.edu/~wedu/seed/