It was a seemingly uneventful Friday afternoon in the office for Kevin Bock, when his boss frantically approached. A script for the healthcare clinic’s electronic records needed to be up to code by the coming Monday. If it was not, a $30 million fine loomed. With the development team already gone for the weekend, Bock, a high school junior and intern at the time, was tasked with the lofty responsibility.
After spending one hour learning C Sharp and three more hours building the utility, crisis was averted and $30 million saved. At this moment, Bock realized what he could do with computers and how he could use his abilities to help others.
Four years later, Bock, a START Education Intern, is writing a script to code more than 10,000 comments from START’s Massive Online Open Content courses, or MOOC. Using Ruby SQL, Bock hopes to develop a script that will automatically analyze how people engage in terrorism discourse in a safe, scholarly environment.
Bock has always been interested in cyberterrorism, but one day cemented that interest.
“Being a New Yorker, the September 11th attacks hit very close to home,” Bock said. “The application of programming to cybersecurity urged me to enroll in the Global Terrorism Studies minor at UMD and join the START team.”
In Bock’s free time, you can catch him working on various projects, learning Italian or playing ultimate Frisbee with his friends. However, it seems that working with a close friend to improve an artificially intelligent, chess-playing engine consumes most of his time. Bock noted that “a computer’s ability to play chess is clearly superior to a human’s, but it would be interesting to take it to the next level.”
Bock, a coach in the University of Maryland’s Advanced Cybersecurity Experience for Students program, sees himself working for the United States Department of Defense in the future.
“I am not sure where my passion will take me,” Bock said. “But I am sure that I will apply my passion to making a difference in the world.”