GRAND FORKS — After finishing the radar lab in its national security corridor, the University of North Dakota College of Engineering and Mines is preparing to add two more labs in the summer or fall.
One of the labs involves cybersecurity, a subject Dean Ryan Adams said has been growing alongside artificial intelligence.
“Cybersecurity, of course, uses AI a lot, and so we have a cybersecurity research center, another state-designated center,” he said. “Focused on cyber, but AI has to be involved on some level.”
The college will be working to renovate two lab spaces into a machine vision lab and cybersecurity lab. The cybersecurity lab’s intention is to have a variety of pieces of equipment to test cybersecurity principles on, Adams said. For example, someone may have a router, a switch and computers, and make the setup a test bed for the campus. The test bed can be used for ethical hacking, to explore how to make it more secure and resistant to attacks.
“It’ll be a real hands-on space that we want to give people an opportunity to do real research on,” he said.
Ethical hacking is now a discipline that can be trained and people can be hired for, Adams said.
The college has also invested in seven new research-focused faculty in cybersecurity and AI, with more research happening every day. Along with the state-designated cybersecurity research center, the college has one focused on AI as well.
Last August, the college started its Ph.D. program in AI. Adams said, from the academic side, it’s a multidisciplinary program allowing and encouraging students to take classes from other colleges as part of the program.
“So that they’re getting a broader, human aspect to the technology and that approach, which I think is very, very good,” he said.
The machine vision lab is focused on optics and will involve research related to how a computer interprets the image a camera might take, Adams said. It can also look at infrared and the kinds of sensors put on high-end drones, such as the Range Hawk program Northrop Grumman is working on. The national security focus of the lab will be called ISR for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. While what is being worked on can be used for military applications, it could also be used for something like agriculture, spotting pests attacking plants, Adams said.
Otto is the University of North Dakota reporter for the Grand Forks Herald.
