Cyber security is a social science

Here is a presentation from 2018 marking the foundation of the Social Cyber Group and its affiliated Social Cyber Institute in Australia. Both are spin-offs from UNSW Canberra. The key message was this: “Cyber security is now a social science.”

The slide set was used in a  briefing to venture capitalists at UNSW Sydney co-organised by the Enterprise Division of UNSW (led by Dr Elizabeth Eastland) and Professor Greg Austin (@UNSW Canberra). The event, initiated by Eastland, was to inform investors of new products and prototypes that had emerged from UNSW research.  The challenge Professor Austin took up in presenting his own briefing, alongside marshalling the technological breakthroughs of UNSW, was how to commercialise social science research on cyber security.

Austin and several colleagues developed that idea since then, especially in the paper Creating Social Cyber Value published in 2019. The Social Cyber Institute has been slowly evolving. The professorial colleague involved in the founding was Professor Glenn Withers AO, at the time the Chair of the Australian Council of Learned Academies and the immediate past President of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia. He was also Chair of the Global Develpment Learning Network of the World Bank and a Visiting Professor at UNSW Canberra in the Cyber Security Centre.. The founding also involved Lisa Materano, CEO of Blended Learning International, a registered training organisation. and a spin-off from the Australian National University. In 2024, the Institute was established as an independent not-for-profit company, separate from the Social Cyber Group, which remains a for-propfit entitiy, including through its Social Cyber and Tech Academy. In 2024, the Institute set up its Fellows Program and connected with new talents in Australia and overseas.

In 2025, we welcomed Professor Katina Michael to the Board of the Institute, one of the most eminent global researchers on social aspects of cyber security. Between 2018-2024, Michael held a joint professorial appointment with the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence, Arizona State University, where she was the Director of the Society Policy Engineering Collective. She is the Founding Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Technology and Society, and formerly EIC of the IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, editor at Computers & Security, and senior editor at IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine. She is the Founding Chair of the ASU Master of Science in Public Interest Technology.

The expansion of the Institute was also supported by Adam Henry, now a Ph D candidate at RMIT University. The Institute is staffed by volunteers and supported financially by the Social Cyber Group.