The educational goal of the institute at Northeastern University is to stimulate student interest in Information Assurance, and to encourage interdisciplinary course offerings and research activities at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Our activities will concentrate on:

•	mentoring students interested in Information Assurance
•	facilitating the introduction of new curriculum and/or programs related to Information Assurance,
•	encouraging research activities among undergraduate and graduate students,
•	hosting speakers from corporate and academic environments to discuss their professional experience,
•	providing resources and opportunities for students to explore and to experiment with com-put er systems, and
•	maintaining close industrial ties through consulting, collaboration and cooperative programs.

The information assurance education program at the College of Computer and Information Science (CCIS) has traditionally concentrated at producing Ph.D. graduates who continue to work on research and development in the telecommunication, commercial and educational sectors. They receive their training in information assurance through a combination of course work, research seminars and summer internships at industrial laboratories. CCIS has now extended information assurance training to both undergraduate and M.S. students. Specifically, the College offers MS in CS with concentration in Information Security, MS in IA, and BS in CS or IS with security courses offered as electives.

Information Security

The establishment of the Institute provides an infrastructure that we can further our goals by developing new collaboration with other units in the University. In addition, it can facilitate the timely transfer of cutting edge research results to the classroom. The College of Computer and Information Science already has developed an interdisciplinary program with the College of Criminal Justice on Information Assurance at the MS level. The establishment of the Institute can further provide guidance to the development of an interdisciplinary undergraduate program in Security Engineering, that will include coursework in both ECE and CCIS.

Graduate Education and Undergraduate Research Opportunities

At the graduate level, ECE and CCIS will develop a joint seminar series highlighting some of the cutting edge Information Assurance research topics. We will run one-day symposium on campus centering on a chosen topic, such as Distributed Denial of Service Attacks on metropolitan areas.

Other than increasing course offerings in Information Assurance, such as Applied Cryptography and Software Security, we will provide research opportunities to strong undergraduates either through NSF-funded Research Education Undergraduate (REU) opportunities, or through honors research seminar course. As an example, we will provide honors senior students a project course on designing and implementing a robust and secure heterogeneous wireless network of mobile robots

The goal is to build rescue-mission oriented heterogeneous wireless systems, operating in adversarial environments. The class will be divided into teams, each of which will compete with each other in finding and rescuing an object that is hidden under some rubble. These projects will evolve with time and faculty interest. We anticipate that the Institute can play an important role in encouraging and designing interdisciplinary projects in the future.