Prasasthy Balasubramanian

Da-Lun Chen, Prasasthy Balasubramanian, Lauri Lovén et al.

Many staff and students in higher education have adopted generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools in their work and study. GenAI is expected to enhance cognitive systems by enabling personalized learning and streamlining educational services. However, stakeholders perceptions of GenAI in higher education remain divided, shaped by cultural, disciplinary, and institutional contexts. In addition, the EU AI Act requires universities to ensure regulatory compliance when deploying cognitive systems. These developments highlight the need for institutions to engage stakeholders and tailor GenAI integration to their needs while addressing concerns. This study investigates how GenAI is perceived within the disciplines of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering (ITEE). Using a mixed-method approach, we surveyed 61 staff and 37 students at the Faculty of ITEE, University of Oulu. The results reveal both shared and discipline-specific themes, including strong interest in programming support from GenAI and concerns over response quality, privacy, and academic integrity. Drawing from these insights, the study identifies a set of high-level requirements and proposes a conceptual framework for responsible GenAI integration. Disciplinary-specific requirements reinforce the importance of stakeholder engagement when integrating GenAI into higher education. The high-level requirements and the framework provide practical guidance for universities aiming to harness GenAI while addressing stakeholder concerns and ensuring regulatory compliance.

Prasasthy Balasubramanian, Dumindu Kankanamge, Ekaterina Gilman et al.

Conversational AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) have become powerful tools across domains, including cybersecurity, where they help detect threats early and improve response times. However, challenges such as false positives and complex model management still limit trust. Although Explainable AI (XAI) aims to make AI decisions more transparent, many security analysts remain uncertain about its usefulness. This study presents a framework that detects anomalies and provides high-quality explanations through visual tools BERTViz and Captum, combined with natural language reports based on attention outputs. This reduces manual effort and speeds up remediation. Our comparative analysis showed that RoBERTa offers high accuracy (99.6 %) and strong anomaly detection, outperforming Falcon-7B and DeBERTa, as well as exhibiting better flexibility than large-scale Mistral-7B on the HDFS dataset from LogHub. User feedback confirms the chatbot's ease of use and improved understanding of anomalies, demonstrating the ability of the developed framework to strengthen cybersecurity workflows.