Dr. Prabhu has received a three-year, $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation’s CyberAICorps Scholarship for Service (SFS) Innovation Track to develop an AI-powered training system for cybersecurity professionals. The project, CyberAI Innovation: Training the Human Firewall Through Generative AI Adversaries and Metacognitive Scaffolding for Cybersecurity Workforce Resilience, addresses a growing gap between the sophistication of AI-driven cyberattacks and the cognitive readiness of the professionals defending against them.
Dr. Prabhu serves as Principal Investigator, alongside Co-Principal Investigators Dr. Roger Azevedo and Dr. Grace Fox. The team will build a multi-agent adaptive tutoring system: an Adversary Agent that generates realistic AI-enabled threat scenarios (social engineering, prompt injection, and insider-threat behavior), a Diagnostic Agent that identifies individual gaps in a learner’s self-assessed confidence versus actual performance, and a Metacognitive Scaffolding Agent that delivers personalized training to close those gaps. Over three years, the system will be evaluated with 120–200 graduate learners at UCF, a National Center of Academic Excellence in Cybersecurity, with a pilot at a partner institution coordinated through the Florida High Tech Corridor. All training materials and system code will be released as open educational resources for adoption at other institutions.