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Headshots for Ngo, Ayala and Garcia

A trio of researchers from UC Irvine’s Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) received a top award as one of six winners of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Building an Adaptive and Competitive Workforce track through the Tools Competition. Ph.D. student Steven Ngo led the team, which also included Ph.D. student Jessy Ayala and Assistant Professor of Informatics Joshua Garcia.

The Building an Adaptive and Competitive Workforce track sought tools that support adult learners in developing critical skills necessary for the current and future national security workforce. Teams that participated in this DARPA-sponsored opportunity include technologists, digital learning platform experts, researchers, students, and educators proposing tools to empower adults with the complex skills required for the continuously advancing 21st-century, such as data science and STEM competencies.

The ICS team is developing Codesafe, a free educational platform that addresses gaps in traditional computer science curricula by focusing on code comprehension, software engineering, and software security. “Our initial plan is to develop a prototype usable in ICS courses as a supplement alongside regular coursework,” says Ngo. “Codesafe will have gamified exercises and challenges modeled around practical software engineering and security scenarios to reinforce the concepts they learn from lectures.” This award will allow the team to further refine the platform and upgrade the infrastructure behind it.

The competition also favored proposals and tools that leverage generative AI and large language models (LLMs). The ICS team will utilize AI and LLMs to accelerate the development of Codesafe and offer a wide variety of novel challenges, providing opportunities for upskilling and reskilling into the software engineering and cybersecurity workforce. “With Codesafe, we aim to contribute to a more diverse and secure tech industry required to navigate today’s cybersecurity landscape in an accessible and gamified manner through the use of LLMs for security education,” says Ayala.

With Codesafe, we aim to contribute to a more diverse and secure tech industry required to navigate today’s cybersecurity landscape in an accessible and gamified manner. — Jessy Ayala

“We’re very excited to incorporate Codesafe into the classroom,” says Garcia, “starting with some of the courses I teach and working to make Codesafe particularly beneficial for low-income, minoritized, or underrepresented groups.”

The Building an Adaptive and Competitive Workforce track was one of six funding opportunities offered as part of the 2023-24 cycle of the Tools Competition. This year, the Tools Competition received more than 1,900 submissions from applicants across the globe, including over 230 submissions to DARPA’s track alone (2.6% success rate for achieving funding).

The Tools Competition is in its fourth cycle and has awarded $17.5 million to 130 ed tech innovators around the world to date. See a full list of winners and their projects and learn more about the next cycle of the Tools Competition.

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