TECHNICAL COLLEGES
Cybersecurity and AI are major focuses and areas of concern for Saudi leaders. UPM and AEC are teaching the next generation of Saudi professionals to fill the jobs of the future.
How do your schools fit in the educational landscape of the Kingdom?
There is a cultural change happening in universities. In the past, students chose extremely general disciplines, but today employers ask for more specific backgrounds. We offer these competency and skills-based programs. We offer programs in network communications, software engineering, and information engineering. We need to keep an eye on current developments and what should come next. We are seeing interesting problems develop, like hacking attacks on different websites. The IT infrastructure in the Kingdom needs careful attention to make sure it is not being hacked by terrorists or foreigners. Cybersecurity is a deeply important area. We have a new program focusing on Saudi specifically.
KH
Advancement in technology is indeed changing the way we deliver education and do business with our customers. For example, last semester, we taught a course in collaboration with the University of Illinois’s faculty of computer science in full synchronization. That meant the faculty members there were teaching our students, while our faculty here were teaching their students. As for challenges, CISCO is forecasting that there will be 75 billion devices connected to the Internet by 2025, forming what is called the IoT. There are two main challenges along with it. The first one, from a cybersecurity perspective, is that these devices are not secure. If you have a massive number of devices that are connected, even if they are as simple as location or humidity sensors, they do not have encryption or security features. That is because they are using cheap hardware, so their processing capabilities are very basic. As a result, these IoT devices can be easily compromised. A second challenge is the lack of a sufficient number of IP addresses for all the internet-enabled devices. ✖
AS