NIST Enlists Florida University, New America to Develop Education, Conference Programs

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has teamed up with Florida International University on cybersecurity education.

The partnership entails not only FIU but its affiliate New America, a nonprofit, tech innovation think tank. NIST has awarded the organizations a five-year contract valued at $250,000 per year to manage the NICE Stakeholder Program, a subset of NIST’s National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education (NICE) program.

Last year, FIU and New America teamed up to launch a Cybersecurity Capacity Building Partnership aimed at promoting digital security in the workplace. Thus they seem a good fit for NICE, whose mission is “to energize and promote a robust network and ecosystem of cybersecurity efforts,” according to a NIST statement. In managing the NICE Stakeholder Engagement Program, the organizations are charged with organizing outreach activities aimed at the promotion of NICE objectives; and ultimately they will organize the NICE Conference and Expo, envisioned as an annual event.

In announcing the plans, NIST did not specify the areas of digital security upon which the organizations will focus, but it’s a fair bet that biometric technologies will play a key role, given NIST’s consistent efforts to foster innovation in the development of biometric solutions for law enforcement, and its routine testing of technologies like facial recognition and fingerprint scanning systems.

–

April 10, 2018 – by Alex Perala