Government Keynote: RAAF's journey with Agile methodologies Wing Commander Mike Moroney, AI Lead for the Royal Australian Air Force

Wing Commander Moroney,
RAAF AI Lead

Greetings from the Hyatt Hotel in Canberra, where Wing Commander Mike Moroney, AI Lead for the Royal Australian Air Force, is speaking on "RAAF's journey with Agile methodologies". He pointed out that crew-less aircraft are being experimented with having AI onboard. Curiously he mentioned US based projects, not the Boeing MQ-28 Ghost Bat, being built in Queensland. 

Wing Commander Moroney said he never finished "The Phoenix Project" (BY GENE KIM, KEVIN BEHR, GEORGE SPAFFORD), about DevOps, as it was "too triggering", but "The DevOps Handbook" (BY GENE KIM, JEZ HUMBLE, PATRICK DEBOIS, JOHN WILLIS, NICOLE FORSGREN) is okay. Also he recommended Accelerate (BY NICOLE FORSGREN, JEZ HUMBLE, GENE KIM).

Securing Government Data Used with AI a Jobs Growth Area

Jayden Cooke, ASD on 
Secure by Design

Greetings from the Hyatt Hotel in Canberra, where Jayden Cooke, Technical Director, Secure Design and Architecture | Cyber Uplift | Cyber Security Resilience, Australian Signals Directorate (ASD), is speaking on "Secure by Design and Default" (SbD2). This is a keynote presentation at a GitLab event organised by Public Sector Network. ASD not only has a website on Secure by Design, but also detailed documents on how to do it.

This was a refreshing change from the proceeding GitLab sales pitches. It was still a sales pitch, especially with claims of by in from "Five Eyes" partners. The idea is a reasonably simple one: rather than build software and then think about how to make it secure, instead think about security from the start. This requires a systematic approach which ASD has been attempting to have universities teach to their students. At present there is a golden opportunity for this. A few months ago we asked computer project students participating in the award winning ANU Techlauncher Project to write a couple of sentences about what they see as their future career. Many nominated AI, and other cyber security. The intersection (or collision) of the two I suggest will be an area of demand for staff as AI security flaws come to light. 

Continuous Delivery of Assessment

Dr Ben Swift gave a very interesting talk to tutors at the Australian National University recently about the work he has been doing using Gitlab and Continuous Integration (CI) for grading. In courses such as Art & Interaction in New Media, the tool Gitlab is used to provide an online repository of the work of each student. Students are given a template for submitting their work. As soon as uploaded, the CI feature of GitLab is  activated to carry out a series of checks specified by the lecturer of what the student submitted. These can be basic checks, such as verifying the student has included the statement it is their own work, comparison checks looking for plagiarism, and performance checks to see the code submitted does what it is supposed to. This has the considerable potential to be applied more widely to provide less stressful, more realistic assessment.

This approach might be applied beyond just computer code, to large bodies of written work with a complex structure. As Ben suggested, it would help get students out of the mindset of waiting until the last minute to submit. I suggest this could be taken further to apply the computer concept of "Continuous Delivery". With this approach the student would be expected to build a body of work in the repository, to the required standard, throughout their course. All of this work would be time and date stamped, and the student would be assessed on improvement over time, as well as quality of the finished product. A student who only deposited work in the repository shortly before a deadline would receive a grade of zero, regardless of the quality of their work, as they did not show improvement over time.

A byproduct of this approach would be to make cheating much harder. A student would have to steal, or pay for, a whole consistent body of work to be produced, not just individual assignments. They would have to deposit this work in the repository over time, in credibly sized installments, from Internet addresses consistent with their location. Multi-factor, or biometric challenges during submission could be used to make cheating even harder. Part of the student's assessment could be questions automatically generated from their own work.