BLACKBERRY PARTNERSHIP
Master’s students will interact with executives in cybersecurity curriculum
Local students go to boot camp
Next week, students in the University of Windsor’s Graduate Master’s Program in Applied Computing will be heading off to Blackberry Bootcamp, in a virtual sense, after Monday’s announcement of the creation of a new cybersecurity curriculum.
The 10-week program is a collaboration between the school and Blackberry Ltd. and will form a portion of students’ grades. It’s the first program of its kind created by the company with a Canadian university.
“The University of Windsor is one of our top pipelines for (our) co-ops,” said Neelam Sandhu, Blackberry’s vice-president of business operations and strategic accounts, Office of the CEO.
“It felt like a natural fit to work with the university on a program like this.
“The university has a lot of tech talent — a pool of talent that’s attracting a lot of tech companies into the market.”
The online course will feature lectures by top executives from Blackberry, who will also interact with students.
The program will cover a range of cybersecurity topics, including digital identity protection and privacy, software engineering, the latest techniques of cybercriminals and advanced threat detection technologies.
Students will listen to a Blackberry guest speaker one week and then work on projects related to the designated topic with the director of the Faculty of Computer Science, Ziad Kobti, the following week. Kobti is past president of the Canadian Artificial Intelligence
Association.
“As we work with the team for the Master’s program there are opportunities, particularly for data science roles,” Sandhu said.
“With AI becoming more important to the security landscape, with the number of threats and number of end points (network communicating devices) growing so fast, you need AI to scale to manage that environment.”
Fourth-year computer science student and Blackberry campus ambassador Noah Campbell said getting access to the company’s top executives is invaluable.
“Some things you just can’t learn in the classroom as well as getting access to industry and the people actually doing these things,” Campbell said. “We’re going to be learning skills from the very best. They’ve made innovations in both the public and private sectors.”
The demand for cybersecurity skills is unrelenting around the world.
A study published last year by the International Information System Security Certification Consortium found there were 2.93 million unfilled cybersecurity positions globally.
The U.S’S FBI reports cyber attacks have increased 300 per cent during the COVID-19 pandemic. The World Health Organization has said it has experienced five times as many attacks during the pandemic.