IES (International, Engagement & Service) Ambassador for King’s College London
Vice Dean (Enterprise & Engagement) of the Faculty of Natural, Mathematical & Engineering Sciences
Professor and Head of the
Cybersecurity Group of the Department of Informatics
King's College London, UK
“Show, don’t tell” has become the literary commandment for any writer. It applies to all forms of fiction, and to non-fiction, including scientific writing, where it lies at the heart of many scientific communication and storytelling approaches. In this talk, I will discuss how “show and tell” is actually often the best approach when one wants to present, teach or explain complicated ideas such as those underlying notions and results in mathematics and science, and in particular in cybersecurity. I will discuss how different kinds of artworks can be used to explain cybersecurity and I illustrate how telling (i.e., explaining notions in a formal, technical way) can be paired with showing through visual storytelling or other forms of storytelling. I will also discuss four categories of artworks and the explanations they help provide. As concrete examples, I will focus on 15 films starring Nicolas Cage which directly revolve around cybersecurity or can be used to explain cybersecurity notions in such a way that they can be understood by non-experts, along with cartoons such as Peppa Pig and fairy Tales such as Cinderella. This talk covers research that I have described in my three papers "Explaining Cybersecurity Using Films and the Arts”, "Don’t Tell Me The Cybersecurity Moon Is Shining… (Cybersecurity Show and Tell)” and "Nicolas Cage is the Center of the Cybersecurity Universe”. I will also present some results that are still unpublished about experiments that we have carried out to understand the quantitative and qualitative impact of films and other popular artworks.