Weekly Logs

During the first month of the course, a lot of preparation and planning was done for the entire research paper process. The driving question and the design plan were created. With the help of one of the English teachers, I was able to revise my driving question to be more understandable and specific. Initially, my driving question was "How effective is the usage of artificial intelligence in cyber security and in terms of preventing the user(s) from getting cyber attacked?". However, I decided to change it to "How effective is the use of artificial intelligence in recognizing the potential cyber threat and then protecting the user(s) from the cyber attack?" because the initial version didn't seem to be very clear about 2 parts of the question. In addition, the question didn't seem to be clear in general, so with having a conference meeting with Mrs. Tebbetts, I was able to revise it and make it better.

During this week, I was able to meet with my first community contact as part of the Networking Event. We met on Wednesday, October 6th. I was fortunate enough to get suggestions, ideas, and advice about my research paper from someone, who is working in the cybersecurity field. We had a great conversation about my research paper, her job titles, her day-to-day life, and more. In the end, she told me that she would be available to connect me to her co-worker that works closely with AI that could potentially help me with my research.

During the week of October 13rd, I was working on setting up the meeting with Dr. Baggili and working on my scholarly article #2. I was glad that I was able to get feedback on my email to Dr. Baggili from Mrs. Tebbetts before actually sending it out. I wanted to make sure that I would sound as professional as possible. She was able to correct me on the grammar and the phrasing, and I have sent it. In terms of the scholarly article, I have done the one, titled, “A Deep Learning Ensemble for Network Anomaly and Cyber-Attack Detection”. I was quite fascinated by it, and something that I found interesting, was their approach to the problem of preventing network anomalies. Their approach was providing a machine learning-based anomaly detector and optimal solutions to make the detection tools resilient. This is something I never thought of, and I found it interesting in terms of how successful it was.

During the week of October 18th, I was researching for more opportunities of getting knowledge about my research topic, and I got upon the Human Layer Security Summit. It was the summit that is run by the company Tessian, which is specialized in the detection of catching any emails that could potentially be a cyber threat to the user. Even though this summit was not exactly on my topic, I still got a lot of takeaways from it, in general about cybersecurity. Something that I found out that is the most interesting was that 85-90% of emails that are considered spam are stopped by security gateways. I was glad that I attended it because it expanded my general knowledge of cybersecurity, and they did have the session that talked about the connection between AI and how black-hat hackers might use it today.

During the week of October 25th, mainly I was working on my networking event reflection and also processing my scholarly article #4. Since I had the Networking Event already, I was able to start the process of writing my networking event reflection that would talk about my personal thoughts and the process of what and how it happened. This helped me truly reflect on the meeting and gave me an experience of what it's like meeting with the professional and talking about your personal research project. In terms of the scholarly article, I was processing the one titled "A Deep Learning Algorithm for Botnet Detection in the Internet-of-Things Networks". I wasn't able to complete it yet, but something that I am finding interesting is their approach. I was interested in their algorithm that is Deep-Learning-based that is specialized in botnet attack detection and it was able to also handle highly imbalanced network traffic data.

During the week of November 1st, I was mostly focused on finishing up the Digital Portfolio for the Q1 check. I was going through the checklist of things we must have on there, and adding anything that was missing. In addition, I was also revising some of the pieces of text too, to make sure that they are detailed enough to get a good grade. Other than the fact that the grade for this counts into the grade, I still found it useful for myself. I found out that it helped me get back on track since I have noticed that I started "slacking off" and wasn't putting my best into the project. With Mrs. Tebbetts' help and having a conference meeting with her, I was able to successfully complete everything to make sure that I will be good to continue my work in the next quarter.

During the week of November 8th, I mainly spent time working on the Individual Reflection. As I was trying to connect the work that I have done so far, I was able to realize the areas that I was to excel, however with that, I was also able to see the areas of improvement. I was connecting my work to the 3 main VOGS and trying to give specific examples of why I deserve the grade that I selected. This required me to look through the work I have done, my performance, the rubrics I have received, and be honest with myself in terms of where I think I am standing.

During the week of November 15th, I have started working on compiling and connecting various information and knowledge from the research papers I have analyzed. I have created a document where it would mention the common knowledge and terms that the papers have used and that I have seen. I was able to understand the general process of how the models are created, and also different approaches of how the researchers approached when it comes to dealing with different cyber attacks. This will help me to get a deeper understanding of the topic, which can help me in writing my actual research paper in January. Making connections between papers helps me understand and see how researchers are thinking in the same way, to a certain extend.

During the week of November 29th, I was mainly working on the 2-minute practice presentation. This presentation was a practice for us, for our upcoming Mid-Year Presentation that will be in January, that is also our exam of this course. In that presentation, I had only 2 minutes, which means I had to prepare only the most important aspects of my work and being able to present it to the general public in an efficient way that is easily understandable, but also technical, to show the level of my understanding of this topic. It was hard for me, since the topic I have is pretty complex and not many people know about artificial intelligence and cyber security. I gave my presentation on Friday, and overall, the feedback that I got from my teacher and the students was positive.

During the week of December 9th, I wasn't able to complete much of the work due to the limited time, however, the main focus for me was making connections with other professionals. I have had a conversation with Dr. Netcoh about the possible job shadow and/or internships that I can take upon for my research, and we were able to discuss a few options I had. In addition, I was searching the web and utilized other resources to see if I can contact anyone else to meet with me to talk about my project. I already am a few steps ahead of my peers, due to already meeting with professions, however, a lot of time has passed since I have met a professional, and I would like to get the perspective and opinion on my work from the professional. and possibly get the answers and share my personal thoughts on the topic that I have gained.

During the week of December 13th, I have slowly started the process of summarizing and connecting the dots across the various research papers that I have scanned. I have realized that the research papers may cover different cyber attacks, there are still some aspects and concepts that are the same. It helped me because it gave me a better general understanding of the application of AI in cyber security and helped me to understand the topics better. Plus, seeing how the terms were used in slightly different contexts also helped me to grasp a better understanding of them.

During the week of December 20th, I was continuing my work on processing the scholarly articles. As I was going through another article, I have decided to take a small pause to reflect on my research, and came to the conclusion that I need to start make my research paper collection more diverse. I have been processing the similar articles that talk about the same concept and they do not give me new perspectives. I have decided to branch out, and with the help of the school's librarian, Mrs. Johnson, I was able to find more research papers that would still talk about the concept of AI in cyber security, however it would look at it at a different angle. It felt like a fresh breath, finally seeing something new.

During the week of January 3rd, I was able to get started with my mid-year presentation. A mid-year presentation is a formative presentation that all Capstone students must perform as a form of practice for the official, end of the year, Exhibition of Learning presentation. As I was preparing for the presentation, I was able to reflect on my process so far in my project. It made me realize that with my personal privilege of being ahead of my peers in terms of general knowledge and having already community contacts in who I was sure I would be able to talk to, it made me realize that the point of where I am is slightly different than where the others are. Nonetheless, even though it was just formative, I appreciate being able to reflect on my work and how I come so far.

During the week of January 10th, was the week when the Capstone classes were able to gather together in small clusters to present to each other the progress we have made so far. I got a lot of insight into other people's projects that were also part of the Capstone courses that I never thought even existed in the first place. I found it fascinating, to hear about projects that cover topics from cancer, programming, to social justice, and sports. I'm glad I got to know what other people are doing as part of their Capstone project and I even got a chance to talk to some of the students afterwards, because I was that invested into their topic. Overall, it was an amazing experience of getting to know other...Capstoners? :)

During the week of January 18th, we were starting the next phase of the research paper writing, which was creating Sketchnotes. After we have gone through the Sketchnotes and looked at some examples, we spent some independent time working on our own versions of them. This really helped me in terms of synthesizing all the information gathered on one piece of paper, and I really enjoyed the activity. This helped me generate some of the topics that I would like to discuss in my paper, which is going to be useful for the time when I will start outlining my research paper.

During the week of January 31st, I was mainly preparing for the final exam of my Medical Terminology course by Tunxis. Even though this has no connection to my research topics, I still decided to pick this class. I appreciate and thank my teacher for such an opportunity because, through this course, I was able to learn a lot about the terms that are commonly used in the medical field, which means that I am slightly more likely to understand more if someone was to talk about their research paper that is medically-related.

During the week of February 7th, we have started the process of writing the first draft of the research paper. Based on the knowledge collected, I have decided to start off with the advantages and disadvantages of AI. As I was working on drafting, I was able to identify some holes that I need to research more, like some examples/statistics that are related to the topics I have discussed, and doing a deeper dive on the topics I wanted to talk about, yet do not have enough information about it. I was able to find some articles for me to go through, which helped me gain more information and ensure I have all the knowledge needed for the writing.

During the week of February 14th, I was able to change my driving question and get it approved by the steering committee. Initially, it was "How effective is the use of artificial intelligence in recognizing the potential cyber threat and then protecting the user(s) from the cyber attack?". However, I changed it to "How effective is the use of one or more artificial intelligence model(s) in recognizing the potential cyber threat(s)?". As I started working on my research paper, I have realized that all my research papers talked about how AI was incorporated in detecting cyber threats, which my initial question didn't reflect. Another reason why I changed, was because I have realized that when it comes to "protecting the users", it is more of an algorithm-based process, which is not relevant to my initial topics. Lastly, originally, I had the application of one or more models at the same time visioned in my research, however, it wasn't reflected in my driving question. I appreciate the steering committee for accepting my change because now I can focus on the aspects of AI and cyber security much better since it reflects the original idea.

During the week of February 28th, I spent the vast majority of my time working on the research paper, in addition to searching for some sources. As I started to slowly pull my research paper together, I needed to find sources for the basic knowledge in AI and cybersecurity, that isn't usually in the research paper - that's how basic it is (for example, the explanation of what features are, examples of malfunctioning and how it can affect, and so on). I had a hard time finding the sources, however, after an extensive search on the web and with the help of some people, I was able to find reliable sources that I could use to cite my knowledge. That way, the information that is not common knowledge to the general public is seen as more reliable, since I had sources to back it up.

During the week of March 7th, I continued working on the research paper for the upcoming peer review. I revised, added necessary sections, started to cite more of the knowledge, and more. As I was working on it, my main goal was to have a draft of the paper be of its best quality, to ensure that the feedback is helpful and useful. In addition, I asked for help from a couple of my friends by asking them to read over the paper and see what parts of it they do not understand or are unclear and show me the areas of improvement if they notice any. I appreciate the feedback and the niche errors that they noticed that I need to change, like changing the year of the deadline from 2020 to 2022 :)

During the week of March 14th, our class started the process of heavy peer review of each other's research papers. As I have spent a significant amount of time writing my research paper, I appreciated the feedback I got from my peer. Getting a fresh mind by looking over the paper and pointing at things that are missing and areas of improvement, I can ensure that the research paper that I will turn in to my teacher, Mrs. Tebbetts is of its best quality. In addition, it also helps me what other knowledge and terms need to be defined since the general public would not be able to understand the paper itself without explanation and definitions.

During the week of March 21st, I have decided to meet with another community contact. I met with Mr. WIlliams, who I know from my GenCyber Agent Academy camp. He works in a known private company that is specialized in offense security, Bishop Fox. He warned me beforehand that he doesn't have too much knowledge and work experience with artificial intelligence, however, he would still try to give his own perspective and opinion. Meeting with him was very useful, since I haven't met with professionals in a while, and as I go further into the process of writing my research paper, I want to meet with a professional who would be able to share their expertise and answer some of the questions that came along, as I am writing a paper.

During the week of March 28th, I have decided to collect and ensure that I have everything for the quarter 3 portfolio check. Throughout this quarter, I paid extra attention to ensuring that any community hours are talked in my "Community Connections" page and that I am keeping up with my weekly logs. Moreover, I was able to ensure that I have everything by going over the provided by my teacher checklist, which mentions all the materials that should be on our digital portfolios by this time. I was happy to see the personal progress of keeping up with deadlines and ensuring that I am not just putting my best into my work, but also submitting the necessary material on time.

During the week of April 4th, I received the research paper back from my teacher. Mrs. Tebbetts was able to do a heavy review of the research papers and point out all areas of improvement and what needs to be fixed. I am thankful for her feedback because due to her expertise in how the research paper should be like, she was able to show me what are some things that the steering committee is looking for. According to her comments, I have revised the research paper, to ensure that I consider all of her feedback.

During the week of April 18th, we were mainly working on polishing our digital portfolios for the upcoming Product Verification. I mainly worked on checking that the people would be able to access necessary documents and files, in addition to adding more descriptions to certain sections. I thought that having files on different pages is nice, however, there wasn't much context on what it is or how it is related. I thought that, for example, on my "Community Connections" page, it would be useful to add a description of who the community contact was, how I knew them, and what I got out of it.

During the week of April 25th, majority of the class would work on making the final touch-ups to our digital portfolios, in addition to also working on our VOGC Evidence subpages. As I was working on writing the paragraphs, highlighting the moments of when I would express or learned to express the VOGC skills, it made me thoughtfully reflect on the entire school year and the progress I have made since September. I would like to thank my Capstone Advisor for supporting me and being a stunning mentor who taught me a lot of useful skills. As I was reflecting, I have improved in terms of my time management skills, in addition to also now, knowing how the realistic process of writing a research paper goes.