The Future of Cybersecurity: UNC Greensboro Pioneers AI-Powered VR Training

Participating students practice translating sometimes dense technical jargon for decision-makers who don’t have an IT background.

“On the other side, we have clients, some of whom have no technical skills,” he said. “Students had to sometimes rephrase their questions several times to get information, and that was challenging for them. They require very detailed responses to be able to write the reports.”

VR Simulation Includes an AI Cybersecurity Mentor

SCGA did not have hands-on activities to address this problem. To develop a solution, the instructors turned to Bahar Pourbehzadi, assistant professor of Information Systems at UNCG. A doctoral student, Pourbehzadi developed a virtual reality game to help SCGA students get more comfortable with the auditing scenario.

“Students start with an AI mentor who explains what the game is and how it works,” says Pourbehzadi. “Then they sit in front of someone from the executive level of a company and start asking questions tied to the National Institute of Standards and Technology Cybersecurity framework.”

This is a game intentionally rigged for students to fail in the best way, as it encourages them to learn the art of the follow-up question.

“The premise of the game is that this person will not get it on the first try, even if you ask a perfect question. Therefore, they will have a follow-up question for you, and this way students have a continued conversation, which helps them develop the required auditing skills,” Pourbehzadi explains. “They are then evaluated by the AI mentor and receive tailored feedback to improve their skills. Afterward, the students can create an action plan with the help of their mentor AI.”

SCGA students access the game using Meta Quest 3 headsets, located in the department on campus. Pourbehzadi and her team built the game using the Unity development platform. For the AI component, they used a conversational tool called Convai to create the AI mentor in the game.

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“We developed everything for the game characters, designing their personalities and whether this person is charismatic, whether they are skeptical,” shares Pourbehzadi. “Designing the characters is really important because this is a conversation and feedback environment.”

The team made sure to bake in some affirming language for the students as well.

“We did a lot of modifications to make sure that we are encouraging students with the feedback,” Pourbehzadi said. “Our mascot is a Spartan, and in every conversation, the chatbot says, ‘Well done, Spartan!’ It’s unique components like this that really make the game ours.”

The Unique Instructional Value of AI and VR

Beyond the primary goal of preparing SCGA students to more effectively conduct cybersecurity audit interviews with future clients, the VR game and its AI chatbot components deliver additional instructional benefits that are unique to the technology.

“The most important thing that I’ve observed is that the AI mentor’s feedback to every student has been very consistent. Whereas, with a human educator offering feedback to a classroom of students, the quality might vary from student to student,” shares Pourbehzadi. “But with AI, the experience and the quality is very similar for every student. By incorporating AI into a game, students have access to infinite knowledge, which helps deliver consistency.”

In addition, the AI mentors offer endurance beyond the bounds of a human instructor, with endless time for students and countless responses.

“With the VR and AI technology, the best part is that nothing is prescripted, other than the overall structure of the scenarios. So, students can continue the conversation for hours, and it won’t run out of responses,” says Hamedani. “This is an amazing learning opportunity because there’s a good chance that if they ask those questions of us, the instructors, we might not be able to answer all of them. But that AI-powered mentor is an infinite pool of knowledge to draw from.”

VR Training Helps Students Stand Out

Building on the innovative work being done with the VR game by SCGA’s instructors, the team extended this work to a collaborative project with the Consumer, Apparel and Retail Studies Department. That department was a beneficiary of the Chancellor’s Initiative for Transformative Research at UNCG, which awards funding to on-campus interdisciplinary research projects.

“We were recipients of a CITR grant for our work on immersive learning with VR and AI technology,” says Lakshmi Iyer, professor and department head of information systems and supply chain management at UNCG. “As part of this interdisciplinary collaboration, we’re looking at use cases in apparel design.”

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The input and responses they get from the program participants is data that helps inform how the program can improve and evolve as well.

“It will be an iterative design process. We want to see what type of feedback we’re getting from the students who are using and experiencing it,” Iyer adds. “Is it achieving some of the outcomes that we are hoping to get? There’s a lot of research-based work that’s going on behind the scenes. This is a product of all that.”

The kind of hands-on, direct experience being offered to SCGA students is something that makes it unique compared with cybersecurity programs at other universities.

“From a workforce development perspective, these kinds of experiences set our students apart. What we hear from our industry advisory board members is that they want students to have the confidence and the competency to work with clients,” she says. “They want these kinds of soft skills, additional skills that go beyond technical expertise. But too often, their candidates are lacking. So, this VR training is serving a much broader purpose in the industry.”