By: Cassidy Delamarter, USF College of Education
The 做厙TVs College of Education turned the spotlight on one of todays fastest-growing security challenges: how individuals and societies think, learn and make decisions in an increasingly AI-enabled world.
Cognitive security addresses how information and misinformation can be used to manipulate behavior, shape beliefs and influence decision-making. These challenges are increasingly tied to AI, social media and advanced technologies.
At the , co-organized by the Cognitive Security Institute, the college welcomed a mix of educators, researchers, government and industry leaders to identify ways systems can be manipulated against us. With attendees from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a key goal of the two-day conference was active discussions around the development of global standards for cognitive security to ensure people can continue to think for themselves.
In a world where everything is becoming about knowledge and information, everything increasingly becomes about education to some extent, said Nathan Fisk, assistant professor in the USF College of Education, whose work sits at the intersection of cybersecurity, learning sciences and community resilience.
Fisk leads a course on Digital Media and Learning, while serving as one of the College of Educations key faculty focused on cybersecurity education. Fisks work spans research and real-world application. Most recently, he helped lead a hands-on cybersecurity challenge at DEF CON, one of the worlds largest hacking conferences, where the USF College of Education supported a mock water plant that participants could attempt to hack on the floor of the Las Vegas Convention Center.
Whether were talking about power plants, water systems, supply chains or elections, critical infrastructure is ultimately about people, Fisk said. How do we protect critical infrastructure and protect communities when everything is increasingly AI enabled?
Jeff Jockisch
The urgency of this work continues to grow. In December, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) released a major report on cognitive warfare, which examined the effects of technology on human behavior and underscored the global need to address cognitive security.
Lots of businesses think about protecting themselves and their assets because bad guys are going to come after their business, but they dont always think about bad guys coming after individuals in their business and coming after the people and their personal information directly, said Jeff Jockisch, conference attendee and managing partner of Obscure IQ. Cognitive security is a new threat surface that we have to take into account.
Like Fisk, Jockisch feels the conference served as an opportunity for different groups of people to come together and shape outcomes.
One of the things that I'm excited about, at least relative to the future of the College of Education in this space, is to kind of establish education as one of the dominant disciplines by which we can come to understand some of these critical national security challenges, Fisk said.
2026 CognectCon attendees