ACTION Director Giovanni Vigna Advises UC Steering Committee on Safeguarding Critical Infrastructure
Los Angeles, CA -- In an address to the University of California Board of Regents, Distinguished Professor Giovanni Vigna presented critical strategies for securing systems against increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence threats. Speaking as director of the NSF-funded Institute for Agent-based Cyber Threat Intelligence and Operation (ACTION) and head of the systemwide AI Steering Committee’s "Protecting Humans and Humanity" working group, Vigna detailed the dual role of modern AI in cybersecurity.
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Dongyan Xu Delivers Keynote Address at Cyber Sweden 2026
Stockholm, Sweden -- Prof. Dongyan Xu, Samuel D. Conte Professor of Computer Science and Director of CERIAS at Purdue University, as well as a principal researcher affiliated with the NSF AI Institute for Agent-based Cyber Threat Intelligence and Operation (ACTION), delivered an invited presentation on the evolving landscape of cyber-physical system security at this week's Cyber Sweden 2026 conference. Speaking to international researchers, policymakers, and industry leaders, Xu outlined critical strategies for safeguarding complex infrastructures against multi-domain security threats.
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Hybrid Twin Model for Freight Rail Defense at DCS-CI 2026
September 2026 — At the Design of Cyber-Secure Critical Infrastructure workshop (DCS-CI 2026) in Buford, GA, Professor Dongyan Xu presented pioneering research from his CERIAS team on safeguarding critical transport infrastructure against next-generation, AI-driven threats. His presentation, titled "A Hybrid Twin Model for Evaluating Protections in Freight Rail against LLM-Based Attacks," addressed the growing intersection between Large Language Models (LLMs) and physical infrastructure security.
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UCSB Summer Undergraduate Research Symposium 2026
On August 13, 2026, ACTION AI was one of eleven undergraduate summer research programs across UC Santa Barbara gathered for a research symposium and poster session. In total, there were 68 posters on display, spanning engineering, the sciences, and the social sciences. The symposium marked the end of an eight-week research experience, full of hands-on training, professional development, and networking opportunities for our scholars.
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ACTION Summer Research Experience: University of Washington 2026
Seattle, Washington -- the University of Washington (UW) served as one of the host sites for the ACTION Institute's Summer Research Experience, advancing critical research into the economic and structural dimensions of cybersecurity. Under the supervision of Professor Radha Poovendran, student intern Brian Lee from the University of Chicago conducted research investigating how cyber insurance design impacts corporate security investments.
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Rutgers Researchers Advance Multi-Agent System Theory in Social Network Learning
New Brunswick, NJ -- During Summer 2026, undergraduate researchers Eli Yablon (Princeton), John Wu (Princeton), and Roger Chen (Duke) completed an 8-week research experience at Rutgers University under the supervision of Professor Jie Gao. Conducted in conjunction with the Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science (DIMACS), the project was mentored by Professor Gao and PhD student Daniel Baumgartner, with funding support from ACTION.
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2026 Summer Research in ACTION at Georgia Tech
Atlanta, Georgia -- Machine learning models used for cyber-threat detection frequently fail when moved to new environments, such as different network configurations or newer timeframes. To overcome this instability, Bell Chen (University of Washington) joined Prof. Xiaoming Huo's lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology to design a framework that verifies whether security models can adapt reliably across shifting domain conditions. Prof. João P. Hespanha (UC Santa Barbara) also collaborated in this Summer Research Experience.
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NeurIPS workshop on AI Evaluation
ACTION Faculty member Bin Yu (UC Berkeley) is an invited panelist at a new workshop at NeurIPS. We include information from the workshop webpage below. Find more information or submit a paper here.
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