Dr. Melissa Danforth

Global Intelligence and National Security (GINS) programs are concentrations in Political Science and Computer Science intended to look at geopolitical, historial, linquistic, and technology factors in traditional intelligence and cybersecurity.

Students seeking information on the Global Politics emphasis in the Political Science major should contact the Political Science Department. This page is just for those who wish to combine GINS with Computer Science or Computer Engineering degrees.

The Cybersecurity/Information Security (IS) concentration in the Computer Science major is intended for students who wish to pursue a career in information assurance and cybersecurity, either with government agencies or with industry. The concentration combines Computer Science, Mathematics, and GINS courses to create an interdisciplinary approach to information assurance and cybersecurity education. This concentration was added to the catalog in Fall 2013 and renamed to Cybersecurity in Fall 2026.

The general format of the IS concentration is to take a core in Computer Sciences, electives in cybersecurity or data science, and cognates in mathematics, professional ethics, and GINS. The GINS cognate exposes students to the geopolitical, historical, and linguistic aspects of cybersecurity, so students develop both a strong technical foundation and a broad view of cybersecurity.

Please refer to the CEE/CS Degree Information page for information about the Quarter-to-Semester transition and for advising checklists for the semester-system catalogs.

A Political Science or Criminal Justice major who wishes to pursue a Computer Science minor should focus on information security related courses within the Computer Science degree. This requires selecting specific course options within the Computer Science minor, such as selecting CMPS 2650 Linux Environment and Administration as your 2000-level elective course if you want to take CMPS 3650 Digital Forensics as one of your upper-division courses.

Please refer to the CEE/CS Degree Information page for information about the Quarter-to-Semester transition and for the advising checklists for semester-system catalogs.

There is no official GINS minor in the catalog, but students can declare a Special Minor with GINS coursework. Students interested in this option should schedule an advising appointment with Melissa Danforth.

For students in Computer Science/Engineering who do not want to switch to the Cybersecurity/Information Security concentration, the biggest challenge with adding a GINS minor to the Computer Science or Computer Engineering major is the number of courses required. The minor courses will not double-count towards the major requirements for the traditional Computer Science or Computer Engineering degrees. However, the Computer Information Systems concentration in Computer Science can count the GINS courses towards their elective requirements (CIS students can offset general electives with a declared minor, but they cannot offset the 4000-level advanced CMPS elective).

Cybersecurity/Information Security majors can offset some of the Focus Area courses with language courses for languages that have been designated as a "Critical Language" or "Strategic Language" by the U.S. government. At CSUB, the only critical languages currently offered (on occasion) are Chinese and Japanese. Several community colleges in the area also offer Chinese and/or Japanese.

The following is an additional resource for developing foreign language skills:

• Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) Program

This workshop was primarily for K-12 teachers and university instructors who are interested in the materials developed for the two cybersecurity REVS-UP sections at CSUB. REVS-UP is a 4 week summer program for high school students, where students are on campus all day Monday - Thursday for the duration of the program. CSUB's NSF SFS grant sponsored two sections of REVS-UP focusing on general cybersecurity and on cryptography.

Archived materials from the workshops:

• 2018 workshop agenda and materials
• 2015 workshop agenda and materials
• 2014 workshop agenda and materials