September Interview
VB: CCI awarded its first round of grants in June. Why were those programs chosen? DaSilva: We issued a call for proposals for experiential learning opportunities. What we wanted to do is complement the opportunities that students already had in the programs that they follow in the community colleges and universi- ties. Virginia actually has a very rich ecosystem of cybersecurity programs at the undergraduate level, at the graduate level, certificates. It’s very impressive how many different programs and with different flavors the students can choose from. While we don’t want to replicate any of that, we just want to give something on top of what already exists. The big consideration … in terms of,
does this add to the existing programs in cybersecurity, … is [is this] open to as many students as possible around Virginia? … We wanted to increase the diversity of the students involved. ... We ended up picking six projects, and they all have different characteristics, and they all do something a little bit different. Two of them are centered on internships, one specifically for startups and one broader for all kinds and sizes of companies. There’s one that establishes a drone racing
competition for all Virginia students. … They can program the drone, and they’ll do a drone race sometime in 2021. There’s one that brings students to work with machine learning algorithms, using a particular dataset from satellite data. Each of them has a different opportunity, but they all give students the opportunity to be involved in a really hands-on manner in something that is relevant to industry and … that’s not typically part of their academic programs.
VB: Drone racing sounds like it would be too much fun to be useful! DaSilva: That’s how you get people involved! You need to create programs that spark people’s imaginations and that sound fun because technology is not drudgery. It’s not just programming and sitting behind a computer. Increasingly, I think that tech- nology has to do with connecting to the cyberphysical systems. These are things like drones or robots who move around in the environment but they require connectivity at all times. … The ultimate competition
52 | SEPTEMBER 2020
The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the adoption of technology for teleworking and autonomous systems by a decade or more, DaSilva says.
is fun, but for you to compete, you actually need to think about the strategy; you need to think about the solution. How do you program these drones to move? How do you keep them connected and so on?
VB: The vision is that someday there’ll also be students who are trying to hack into drones. That’s part of it too, right? DaSilva: Right. The initial competition,
as envisioned by the researchers who were working on it, has more to do with the autonomous operation of the drone, this idea that you don’t have to have a joystick but the drone can fly on its own and so on. [But] every time that you enable this sort of technology, the flip side is that you also potentially open up a new vulnerability and with very serious consequences, of course, especially when you’re dealing
Photo by Will Schermerhorn
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