Teaching Statement

Note: This statement was written during my job search in the Spring of 2004, and may not fully reflect my current philosophy and accomplishments.

I believe that the purpose of teaching is more than just relaying facts and developing basic skills. The goal of teaching is to develop students' ability to make critical judgments of ideas and approaches. In serving this goal, I have found that one must constantly challenge students' perceptions and biases, and force them to take a firm stance for their beliefs. This teaching philosophy led directly to my preferred teaching style. I like to introduce the basics of course material and let qualitative arguments flow from student interaction. The students largely control the direction of the conversation, and hence are afforded the opportunity to explore different perspectives. Such interactions are essential to the development of the skills needed to participate in academic discourse.

I further believe that that the development of security material throughout undergraduate and graduate curricula is essential to the further maturation of computer science. A limitation of the past investigation of security has been its treatment as an independent discipline. I think that, like performance and reliability, security should be a primary design goal of any computing system. As such, it seems clear that it is advantageous for computer science departments to teach the perils and techniques of security within existing courses. Informing students on how to design secure applications will not only make them better students, developers, and researchers, but will advance the cause of safe technology.

A frequently overlooked benefit of teaching is its mandate for self-education. Teaching any subject requires a breadth and depth of subject area knowledge that one rarely has the opportunity to develop independently. Particularly in course design, one must organize subject material to form a cohesive narrative. Such a narrative only comes from a deep understanding of the component works and their interrelationships. I have found that the knowledge gained during the development of course material is of enormous value to subsequent research. For example, in preparation for the privacy course I studied Internet public policy issues. This understanding led to my study of Internet piracy that indirectly changed the way the movie industry handles digital media.

In the little under two years since completing the doctoral program at the University of Michigan, I have had the opportunity directly advise several students' research. I have discovered that students need assistance not only with technical direction, but also in identifying and prioritizing goals, developing and executing research plans, and effectively communicating results. I have further found that managing student research often requires approaches that differ from those I employed as an industrial project manager. Students must be allowed to grow into the research, and hence one must constantly recalibrate the amount and substance of direction. I see a doctoral program as being successful when the student no longer needs direction.

As is true of my past work with students, my future instructional efforts will be based upon three educational goals. First, I will promote the teaching of security at all levels of computer science education - from basic programming to graduate level coursework. This will be accomplished initially through the development of security relevant courses, and later by participation in curriculum development activities. Second, I hope to broaden the security research environment of my next position by actively pursing collaborative opportunities with graduate students and faculty in diverse areas of computer science. Finally, I hope to expand my role as mentor by directing graduate student development of novel systems and security research.

Teaching, both in the classroom and out, will be a core component of my faculty career. To date, the instructional experiences I have been afforded have been fulfilling. I have enjoyed my interactions with students, and find the process of instruction to be a central benefit of academic life.

Teaching History

While working toward my Masters degree at Ball State University, I taught an Introduction to C Programming course. This course introduced the basics of language syntax, data structures, and modular design. I was given a list of topics and course textbook from which I developed the course content, assignments, and test materials. I came to realize the enormous importance of diligent lecture and course material preparation during this experience. The student evaluations rated the course a 4.5 on a 5 point scale.

I had the opportunity to guest lecture in the graduate level Advanced Networking course at the University of Michigan in 1999. The course covered seminal works and emerging topics in computer networking. The lecture covered topics in which, prior to this experience, I had very little knowledge. Using skills I garnered while a student in the elective course ``Teaching Engineering'', I took several days preparing the 90 minute lecture. The lecture went extremely well. The students became enthusiastically involved in the content and demonstrated interest and comprehension throughout.

In the winter and spring of 2003 I taught two classes at the Stern School of Business, New York University with my colleague, Lorrie Cranor. The first class was Online Privacy. This course covered the public policy and technical issues associated with privacy and information technology. As one would expect, the vast majority of students were working toward a Masters in Business Administration. This presented both challenges and opportunities. While many of the students had some computer skills, few had any knowledge of how information systems work. Hence, describing technical issues such as privacy preserving architectures required some level of abstraction and simplification. One of the most rewarding aspects of this class was a result of the students' diverse perspectives on privacy. Some found privacy to be useful only as a commercial differentiator. Others saw it as a fundamental, but oft poorly protected right. The wide range of opinions led to many lively discussions. This experience heightened my awareness of the importance of student driven discourse: classes are often most effective when the professor is not at the center of discussion.

The second class I taught at NYU was Computer and Network Security. This class covered the basics of computer security as needed by users and system administrators. The course material was substantially more technical than the preceding class, and hence required different pedagogical devices. I designed the course to be driven by historical, popular culture, and news events. An exceptionally successful lecture used examples of SPAM to motivate the technological issues surrounding its suppression. The students found the history of SPAM engaging. Presented with a simplified view of email infrastructure on the Internet, the students speculated why current counter-measures have proved to be largely ineffective. A key insight I obtained from this experience was that often students became excited about technology only after discovering its relevance.

I was asked by the National Science Foundation and subsequently accepted the opportunity to teach a three-day seminar on Network and Information Security. The seminar brought a dozen faculty from historically black colleges and universities to Jackson State University in Mississippi. I developed content that worked from first principles in secure systems construction and cryptography, through applications of security, and finally to security in emerging technology (e.g., wireless networks, ubiquitous computing). One of the challenges of this seminar was to condense the appropriate material in a coherent and comprehensive way. The seminar was very successful and I have subsequently had numerous contacts and opportunities for collaboration with the attendees. I found the three days I spent in Mississippi to be among the most rewarding of my career.

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