education

Capturing OSINT flags with Cardiff’s Cybersoc

3rd May 2020 by Aidan O'Donnell

Cardiff University’s Cyber Society gave us all its Capture the Flag challenge earlier this year and now has over a thousand players on its leaderboard, many of them sitting on the maximum score 0f 15,000.

The challenges are organised into three streams: ten introductory questions to get you warmed up, 18 tasks for online intelligence gathering and finally a dozen challenges centred around some fictional characters and their online life.

There are no pre-requisites for attempting it — it starts with a “What is OSINT?” question, so beginners are welcome — but it should test most players’ “resilience” (i.e. can you keep playing even though you’ve run out of ideas, patience and any sense that you once knew anything about online intelligence gathering?). At least one of our Computational Journalism students has made it successfully through all the challenges.

The challenges were featured by We Are OSINTCurious on its webcast in March.

SELECT * FROM a day of SQL…

6th March 2020 by Aidan O'Donnell

This month our students survived a full-day workshop on SQL, moving from the very basics of the syntax to querying datasets or working through some of the better tutorials.

First up was the excellent Select Star tutorial by Zi Chong Kao, which is based on a dataset of US prisoners executed since 1976.

We then looked for newslines in a sqlite database of US babynames (via the command line) and wrote queries in Carto to map a dataset of protected Welsh monuments.

There was more sqlite with a database of shooting incidents involving Dallas police officers, this time via a notebook. And we finished with the Knight Center’s fine SQL-based murder mystery.

Enough there to get you started (or refreshed) with your SQL syntax.

Chatbots in the Classroom: Education Innovation Research

7th June 2017 by Martin Chorley

The Computational and Data Journalism team has recently been awarded research funding from the University Centre for Education Innovation to investigate the use of chatbots in the classroom.

The project “proposes the development of chat bots as part of the teaching and learning team to support learning and automate everyday issues to alleviate staff workload.

“This would essentially create an on-demand classroom assistant who can provide informational support whatever schedule students choose to keep outside of the classroom environment and increase their overall satisfaction levels as a result.”

We’ve just hired a 3rd year Computer Science student, Stuart Clark to work with us on the project, and he has started swiftly, working to identify sources of data within the university that such a system can plug into, designing system architectures and interfaces, and beginning work on the implementation.

We’ll follow up this development work over the summer with a live trial of the system in Autumn to see how well it works and assess whether this sort of technology can be successfully used by students and lecturers alike to improve information flow and ease administrative pressures.

We’ll continue to blog about the project as it progresses over the next few months.