arXiv:2604.02238v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative AI (GAI) reveals an irreducible human core at the center of data science: advances in GAI should sharpen, rather than diminish, the focus on human reasoning in data science education. GAI can now execute many routine data science workflows, including cleaning, summarizing, visualizing, modeling, and drafting reports. Yet the competencies that matter most remain irreducibly human: problem formulation, measurement and design, causal identification, statistical and computational reasoning, ethics and accountability, and sensemaking. Drawing on Donoho's Greater Data Science framework, Nolan and Temple Lang's vision of computational literacy, and the McLuhan-Culkin insight that we shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us, this paper traces the emergence of data science through three converging lineages: Tukey's intellectual vision of data analysis as a science, the commercial logic of surveillance capitalism that created industrial demand for data scientists, and the academic programs that followed. Mapping GAI's impact onto Donoho's six divisions of Greater Data Science shows that computing with data (GDS3) has been substantially automated, while data gathering, preparation, and exploration (GDS1) and science about data science (GDS6) still require essential human input. The educational implication is that data science curricula should focus on this human core while teaching students how to contribute effectively within iterative prompt-output-prompt cycles using retrieval-augmented generation, and that learning outcomes and assessments should explicitly evaluate reasoning and judgment.

arXiv:2603.17717v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Supervised detection of network attacks has always been a critical part of network intrusion detection systems (NIDS). Nowadays, in a pivotal time for artificial intelligence (AI), with even more sophisticated attacks that utilize advanced techniques, such as generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) and reinforcement learning, it has become a vital component if we wish to protect our personal data, which are scattered across the web. In this paper, we address two tasks, in the first unified multi-modal NIDS dataset, which incorporates flow-level data, packet payload information and temporal contextual features, from the reprocessed CIC-IDS-2017, CIC-IoT-2023, UNSW-NB15 and CIC-DDoS-2019, with the same feature space. In the first task we use machine learning (ML) algorithms, with stratified cross validation, in order to prevent network attacks, with stability and reliability. In the second task we use adversarial learning algorithms to generate synthetic data, compare them with the real ones and evaluate their fidelity, utility and privacy using the SDV framework, f-divergences, distinguishability and non-parametric statistical tests. The findings provide stable ML models for intrusion detection and generative models with high fidelity and utility, by combining the Synthetic Data Vault framework, the TRTS and TSTR tests, with non-parametric statistical tests and f-divergence measures.