When Carla Brodley took over as dean of Khoury College in 2014, Northeastern’s Align program was still in its infancy — a one-semester master’s bridge for students who had completed an undergraduate STEM degree.

After several iterations of reimagining and tweaking, Align arrived as a two-semester program that welcomed students of all backgrounds, from art history to journalism to business to biology. As a result, Align saw both an enrollment spike and a radical shift in demographics, especially from female applicants. Ever since, Align has been nationally recognized as a model CS master’s bridge program for its curriculum, for its professional pathways, and also for how it has brought students of different backgrounds and experience levels to the often-gated CS field.

Since its founding in 2019, the Center for Inclusive Computing (CIC) at Northeastern, co-led by Carla Brodley and Catherine Gill, has used that expertise to support more than 40 universities in designing and launching their own master’s bridge programs through the MS Pathways to Computing Consortium. Based on that work, in 2022, the National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded the CIC a three-year contract to consult with universities building their bridge programs to a master’s degree in cybersecurity, an area of computing that struggles even more with demographic diversity.

“The idea of the Align program was to provide a new pathway into computer science,” Brodley said. “Once we opened it up to majors of any sort, we observed how interested both students and employers were, and the program started to take off. Now we’ve been doing this for a decade, and we understand what makes a bridge program successful and how to scale it.”

Bridge consulting is just one of many CIC initiatives that advance best practices in inclusive computer science education, and it’s an area that naturally links back to Align and to Brodley. According to Gill, Align’s continued success helps fuel the CIC’s work.

“We’re not replicating the Align program but Align is what motivates us and gives the CIC the credibility to do the work,” Gill said. “Northeastern has one of the largest bridge programs in the country. We have 2,000 students, and it has been reliably over 50% women for six years now. So, we have insight into what it takes — at scale — to bring students from every background and make them viable for jobs in computer science.”

In 2021, the CIC began conversations with the NSF about helping other universities develop bridge programs, particularly for cybersecurity. The NSF’s interest stemmed from a desire to broaden the applicant pool of their CyberCorps Scholarships for Service program (SFS), which funds cybersecurity degrees. For every year that an SFS scholar receives NSF support, they work in a federal cyber job after graduating.

READ: CyberCorps SFS scholar Owen Seltzer scans, secures, and boosts NASA’s networks

The CIC felt that its approach — a student-centric, well-structured bridge — would adapt well to the SFS context. The NSF agreed and funded Bridge to Cyber, a three-year CIC effort to support universities in developing and launching their bridge programs. The CIC’s process includes vetting the schools and then working with those that are selected to clarify their target audience, develop their curriculum, and attract students.

The first cohort of seven Bridge to Cyber schools launched in summer 2023, and the CIC is finalizing the second cohort now. These schools arrive at the CIC’s doorstep at different phases in their program development, and some need more help than others.

“Some schools are super early, where they say, ‘This is a twinkle in our eye. We know that we have to do something, but we’re still in the design phase,’” Gill said. “The second one is implementation, which is ‘We have something, but it’s informal and we need to formalize it.’ And then the third stage is enhancement, which is ‘We have a bridge, and we’ve got proof of concept, but it’s not fully developed. Maybe it’s just an asynchronous module that students plow through, and we want to make it into a full program.’”

That expansion requires an optimal course structure in terms of content and rigor, something that took Brodley and Align leaders several iterations to formulate and balance. The solution, Brodley said, is to prepare students for master’s studies specifically — not replicate introductory undergraduate courses at the master’s level.

“We think about what concepts are needed for success in a graduate program,” Brodley said. “An example is that some concepts in the ‘Algorithms’ class are easy to understand the first time. So, although they are often covered in entry-level undergraduate algorithms courses, they do not need to be part of the bridge curriculum because students will see them again at the graduate level.”

By prioritizing specific areas of study and tightening the curriculum, the CIC works with schools to right-size the coursework into a manageable load for students. This balance between accessibility and rigor is the backbone of a successful bridge program.

“When we come into a new school, often administrators’ instincts are to make the bridge a gatekeeper, and almost unfairly hard,” Gill explained. “So, in that case, we’ll start the conversation by asking, ‘Is our goal to bring people in, or to keep people out?’ At Northeastern, we have a four-class bridge and it takes commitment, but it’s super doable and it’s achievable by anybody who knows how to study. If you have the time management skills, you can do it.”

In addition, building a bridge program requires finding new ways to recruit students — whether they are professionals seeking a career pivot, students who found a CS spark in undergraduate electives, or anyone else whose tech journey isn’t a straightforward path.

“We have a lot of conversations around how universities alter and update their marketing and recruiting muscles to speak to somebody who may not yet have the language in their head of what you’re offering,” Gill said. “You’re selling something to somebody that they don’t know they need because they don’t know it exists.”

In addition to the cybersecurity bridge project, the CIC will continue to use its experience to enhance bridge programs across the country, and in doing so, break down barriers in the CS field.

“We have codified what it takes to make a bridge program, with really good published data showing that it works,” Brodley said. “My hope is that any school that wanted to build this would understand exactly what they needed to do, so that this movement could continue with the master’s in computer science, data science, and cybersecurity just like an MBA — something anyone can do after college, no matter what undergraduate degree they had.”

Diptendu Kar’s path to cybersecurity came about through an unexpected personal experience — falling victim to data deletion.

“When I found out that my external hard drive was suddenly wiped, I was stunned,” Kar says. “After some research, I realized that data can actually be retrieved, and so my journey into cybersecurity began.”

While working towards his cybersecurity master’s degree at Northeastern University, which he completed in December, Kar delved deep into the realms of critical thinking through an exercise called Capture the Flag (CTF). CTFs are dynamic cybersecurity competitions where teams engage in challenges, such as finding hidden text strings in intentionally vulnerable systems, breaking into websites, or identifying software vulnerabilities. CTF competitions have long been a popular method to test technical knowledge and build problem-solving skills, including in cybersecurity courses at Northeastern.

Kar, who now works as a security researcher at Semgrep, had heard of CTFs during his undergrad days prior to arriving at Northeastern.

“I remember being able to solve only one as a beginner,” Kar recalls, “but found myself playing whenever I would have time to practice this art.”

Intrigued, Kar watched YouTube and Twitter gurus like LiveOverflow to learn more. Before long, he found himself participating in every CTF he could find — more than 70 in total — and went on to achieve top 15 finishes in a handful of events, including second place in TexSAW 2023 at UT Dallas and eighth place in the MITRE STEM CTF Cyber Challenge 2022.

In completing challenges based on cryptography and binary exploitation, Kar realized that CTFs were a good way for students to develop and apply their problem-solving skills. These skills also mapped well to the courses he’d taken, especially those on software vulnerabilities, systems security, and network security.

“Solving CTFs is like solving a technical puzzle,” Kar says. “Just like a puzzle, CTFs require practical application of critical thinking skills and tools taught at Northeastern. Plus, it adds immense value to your resume!”

And for beginner-level CTFs in particular, Kar says that learning technical skills is essential.

“The idea is to engage participants in the quest,” Kar says. “It’s essential to use trial and error, process of elimination, and Googling to explore which solutions may be applicable.”

After competing and improving his skills for two years, Kar decided to share the benefits with his fellow Northeastern students. During his time as a teaching assistant for Khoury College’s “Computer System Security” course, Kar created a CTF-style assignment. When he TAed for “Foundations of Information Assurance,” his students took an interest in his CTF expertise. Then, for his master’s capstone project, Kar partnered up with Derek Ng, a fellow CTF enthusiast.

“When Professor [Jose] Sierra reached out to me asking to design CTF challenges for clubs at Northeastern, I was excited,” Kar says. “With Derek’s help, we went on to create different categories of CTFs for various participation levels.”

The journey culminated in November with CasualCTF, a Northeastern CTF competition co-organized by Kar, Ng, the Northeastern chapter of Women in Cybersecurity (WiCYS) and NU’s VICEROY DECREE institute. After another CTF club at Northeastern, NEU CTF Club, reached out to Sierra, Kar quickly began designing CTF challenges for SubZ3r0, a collaboration between NEU CTF Club, WiCYS, and NUSec. Though it recorded great attendance, Kar says there were several challenges to designing a CTF from scratch.

READ: From scholarships to cross-university classes, VICEROY preps Khoury students for cyber defense 

“Balancing motivation with difficulty was the major challenge,” Kar says. “We had to keep in mind that students from all levels would be attending, and that we needed to hit a sweet spot in terms of how challenging the questions were.”

Now graduated, Kar hopes that Northeastern students will continue to expand the university’s CTF offerings.

“There should be a pipeline of students handing over the baton when they graduate,” Kar says. “Only then can we ensure that CTFs become integrated in the world of budding cybersecurity professionals.”

In the decades-old search for effective dementia treatments, Maciej Kos sees our everyday smartphones as a powerful tool.

Throughout his doctoral studies in personal health informatics, Kos has made use of digital biomarkers — physiological and behavioral data collected by digital devices such as smartphones and wearables. This data, Kos says, could counter the sobering scope and reality of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.

“They are challenges to health systems around the world,” said Kos, who recently completed his doctorate at Khoury College. “According to the World Health Organization, there will be 139 million dementia cases worldwide by 2050.”

Kos’s interest in the subject is more than intellectual. Both of his grandmothers had dementia, and as he grew up close by in his native Poland, he saw the toll it took.

“I was motivated by my experience of losing my grandmothers while they were still alive. For them to not recognize my parents and treat them as strangers — it was very hard,” Kos remembered. “I valued learning from my grandparents through their life stories, but those stories ceased abruptly as their dementia advanced. This reality — that as people live longer, they are more likely to experience dementia — could affect any of us. It’s a tragedy that cognitive impairments cause us to lose so much of our shared human experience.”

Driven by that personal experience, Kos pivoted from his undergraduate studies in economics to information science and health informatics.

“For the regular economics graduate, you won’t be intervening in people’s lives in such a positive way,” Kos said. “I appreciate the elegance of algorithms, but what is most important is that computer science makes an impact on real life.”

Kos’s research is a departure from current methods of cognitive testing, which he notes are not as effective as practitioners would like because they are administered once or twice a year at the doctor’s office. A patient’s performance on these tests is affected by many factors, for example, how well they slept the night before and their stress levels. The tests also aren’t always sensitive enough to pick up small changes in cognition, so clinicians often rely on patients recognizing problems in their daily lives — a classic unreliable narrator problem, and one Kos knows well after his grandmother misreported her medicine intake to her doctor.

Kos’ solution is to gather the personal data our smartphones continuously collect, combine it with modern artificial intelligence and machine learning methods, and use it to continuously estimate changes and trends in cognitive behaviors and functions. In doing so, he found that using more smartphone apps, using them longer, and switching between them more frequently all correlate with slower processing speed and poorer sustained attention. By analyzing the patterns over time, Kos spotted subtle behavioral changes — lower engagement in social interactions, for example — that may be imperceptible for patients, but are informative for clinicians.

“I hope that these methods will help us to diagnose patients, develop new behavioral and pharmacological interventions, and individualize therapies,” Kos said. “It’s exciting that smartphone use data can give insight into cognitive health and help us better understand the progression of neurological conditions. This technology could be used by anyone and it doesn’t require buying any new devices. It makes it especially well-suited for low-income individuals who are frequently ignored and disenfranchised by new expensive health technologies.”

After years of doctoral research funded by the National Institute on Aging, Northeastern’s Network Science Institute and TIER 1 grants, Google, Intel, and the Association of Computer Machinery — and supported by advisers Misha Pavel and Stephen Intille — Kos is looking forward to postdoctoral studies under Art Kramer, an expert in brain health and aging in Northeastern’s College of Science.

“[Studying] computer science at Khoury College gave me a sense of agency, that I can effect change,” Kos said. “That’s Northeastern. It allows you to do this very interdisciplinary, cutting-edge research and collaborate with world-class academics and practitioners.”

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