Great Plains broadens Cyber Security program with AI

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly becoming the new norm throughout the world. From helping to protect the world from imminent threats to helping create a grocery list, AI is growing to become ever-flexible.

In an effort to be more innovative in a broader sense, Great Plains Technology Center included AI into their Cybersecurity program in a fundamental way.

Aaron Nettles, Cyber Security instructor, said the course will teach students how to secure AI.

“It’s going to give them a real world application of how that works,” Nettles said. “Then we’re also going to be collaborating with different organizations, schools and businesses as well. There’s a couple of things that they’re gonna be learning, but ultimately it’s gonna be how to secure AI. They’re gonna learn how to fine tune it.”

James Bishop, Director of Instruction, said students will also learn how to download open source large language models such as ChatGPT and install it on a server.

“That’s a skill set that a lot of people don’t have,” Bishop said.

Nettles’ class deals with cybersecurity as a whole, AI is just one of the many things being taught.

“It’s a very fundamental course,” Nettles said. “We teach students the fundamentals of IT (information technology), and then they’ll learn about networking as well and then they’ll learn about cyber security. We try to prepare them to become a cyber security analyst. That entails a lot of information like cyber forensics, data recovery and penetration testing.”

As technology advances, the job opportunities in the cyber security field are ever-growing.

“For a lot of these companies, for instance the hospital, AI is getting so big they have to protect those infrastructures,” Nettles said. “They can’t use ChatGPT, they can’t put customer data into these systems because it’s going somewhere else. It’s on someone else’s infrastructure or network infrastructure, it’s illegal. There’s going to be a time where they’re going to have to put their own servers at the hospital and pay someone to fine tune those servers with those models on there. We’re basically being the front runners and preparing our students for that. They’re going to be the ones that can not only fine tune it, but also protect it.”

Sometimes when people talk about the next version of AI, they usually spend $100 billion to download it.

“There are smaller packages that you can download and Mr. Nettles will do that with his students,” Bishop said. “Downloading those training packages, which are basically just large blocks of data that tell the AI what the world’s about. That’ll be part of the competency that students will learn as well. Where to get started, how to set up my own large language model in my home or at a business and work from that basis so I’m not reliant on those other AI models in the internet.”

Due to a Carl Perkins grant, GPTC was able to purchase the AI server that will be used in the program.

“We submitted a grant application that outlined objectives with regards to how we’re going to use the server,” Bishop said. “A large part of the use of the server was a collaboration between us and Cameron University’s (Department of Computing and Mathematical Services).”

When they received the grant, they were to use a graphics card powerful enough to have been banned for export to hostile countries like China due to its power and its use in regards to AI.

“What it does is it allows a really high end of compute level so we can create the strongest possible AI we can at a local level,” Bishop said.

Out of all the IT programs at GPTC to receive the grant, Cybersecurity was the most closely aligned with AI objectives for local utilization.

“Career Tech is about local support of students and industry,” Bishop said. “Cyber security had so many overlaps with AI in one knowing how it works, how to employ it, and how to train it in order to do specific tasks like cyber security.”

GPTC will start working through the curriculum on how best to implement it. The new curriculum will start next semester with Cameron, Bishop said.