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Building a skilled cybersecurity workforce is paramount to building a safer digital world. However, the diverse skill set, constantly emerging vulnerabilities, and deployment of new cyber threats make learning cybersecurity challenging. Traditional education methods struggle to cope with cybersecurity's rapidly evolving landscape and keep students engaged and motivated. Different studies on students' behaviors show that an interactive mode of education by engaging through a question-answering system or dialoguing is one of the most effective learning methodologies. There is a strong need to create advanced AI-enabled education tools to promote interactive learning in cybersecurity. Unfortunately, there are no publicly available standard question-answer datasets to build such systems for students and novice learners to learn cybersecurity concepts, tools, and techniques. The education course material and online question banks are unstructured and need to be validated and updated by domain experts, which is tedious when done manually. In this paper, we propose CyberGen, a novel unification of large language models (LLMs) and knowledge graphs (KG) to generate the questions and answers for cybersecurity automatically. Augmenting the structured knowledge from knowledge graphs in prompts improves factual reasoning and reduces hallucinations in LLMs. We used the knowledge triples from cybersecurity knowledge graphs (AISecKG) to design prompts for ChatGPT and generate questions and answers using different prompting techniques. Our question-answer dataset, CyberQ, contains around 4k pairs of questions and answers. The domain expert manually evaluated the random samples for consistency and correctness. We train the generative model using the CyberQ dataset for question answering task.

 

We propose a simple yet effective solution to tackle the often-competing goals of fairness and utility in classification tasks. While fairness ensures that the model's predictions are unbiased and do not discriminate against any particular group or individual, utility focuses on maximizing the model's predictive performance. This work introduces the idea of leveraging aleatoric uncertainty (e.g., data ambiguity) to improve the fairness-utility trade-off. Our central hypothesis is that aleatoric uncertainty is a key factor for algorithmic fairness and samples with low aleatoric uncertainty are modeled more accurately and fairly than those with high aleatoric uncertainty. We then propose a principled model to improve fairness when aleatoric uncertainty is high and improve utility elsewhere. Our approach first intervenes in the data distribution to better decouple aleatoric uncertainty and epistemic uncertainty. It then introduces a fairness-utility bi-objective loss defined based on the estimated aleatoric uncertainty. Our approach is theoretically guaranteed to improve the fairness-utility trade-off. Experimental results on both tabular and image datasets show that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods w.r.t. the fairness-utility trade-off and w.r.t. both group and individual fairness metrics. This work presents a fresh perspective on the trade-off between utility and algorithmic fairness and opens a key avenue for the potential of using prediction uncertainty in fair machine learning. 

A recent surge of users migrating from Twitter to alternative platforms, such as Mastodon, raised questions regarding what migration patterns are, how different platforms impact user behaviors, and how migrated users settle in the migration process. In this study, we elaborate how we investigate these questions by collecting data over 10,000 users who migrated from Twitter to Mastodon within the first ten weeks following Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter. Our research is structured in three primary steps. First, we develop algorithms to extract and analyze migration patters. Second, by leveraging behavioral analysis, we examine the distinct architectures of Twitter and Mastodon to learn how different platforms shape user behaviors on each platform. Last, we determine how particular behavioral factors influence users to stay on Mastodon. We share our findings of user migration, insights, and lessons learned from the user behavior study. 

A recent surge of users migrating from Twitter to alternative platforms, such as Mastodon, raised questions regarding what migration patterns are, how different platforms impact user behaviors, and how migrated users settle in the migration process. In this study, we elaborate how we investigate these questions by collecting data over 10,000 users who migrated from Twitter to Mastodon within the first ten weeks following Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter. Our research is structured in three primary steps. First, we develop algorithms to extract and analyze migration patters. Second, by leveraging behavioral analysis, we examine the distinct architectures of Twitter and Mastodon to learn how different platforms shape user behaviors on each platform. Last, we determine how particular behavioral factors influence users to stay on Mastodon. We share our findings of user migration, insights, and lessons learned from the user behavior study. 

Knowledge graphs are graph-based data models which can represent real-time data that is constantly growing with the addition of new information. The question-answering systems over knowledge graphs (KGQA) retrieve answers to a natural language question from the knowledge graph. Most existing KGQA systems use static knowledge bases for offline training. After deployment, they fail to learn from unseen new entities added to the graph. There is a need for dynamic algorithms which can adapt to the evolving graphs and give interpretable results. In this research work, we propose using new auction algorithms for question answering over knowledge graphs. These algorithms can adapt to changing environments in real-time, making them suitable for offline and online training. An auction algorithm computes paths connecting an origin node to one or more destination nodes in a directed graph and uses node prices to guide the search for the path. The prices are initially assigned arbitrarily and updated dynamically based on defined rules. The algorithm navigates the graph from the high-price to the low-price nodes. When new nodes and edges are dynamically added or removed in an evolving knowledge graph, the algorithm can adapt by reusing the prices of existing nodes and assigning arbitrary prices to the new nodes. For subsequent related searches, the “learned” prices provide the means to “transfer knowledge” and act as a “guide”: to steer it toward the lower-priced nodes. Our approach reduces the search computational effort by 60% in our experiments, thus making the algorithm computationally efficient. The resulting path given by the algorithm can be mapped to the attributes of entities and relations in knowledge graphs to provide an explainable answer to the query. We discuss some applications for which our method can be used.