News

iCTF 2025-26 Registration is Open

The iCTF 2025-2026 will take place from 9 March 2026, at 10 am Pacific Time, until 13 March 2026, at 4pm Pacific Time. iCTF was originally scheduled for the beginning of December 2025. Due to unforeseen circumstances, we had to postpone it.

AIVO's New Foundational AI/ML SIG

The AI Institutes Virtual Organization (AIVO) recently launched a new special interest group (SIG) for Foundational AI and Machine Learning. The SIG's inaugural event was a networking lunch for the AI Institutes community and invited industry partners at NeurIPS 2025. In 2026, the group looks forward to new collaborations and activities. 

ACTION Seminar by Yigitcan Kaya

Beyond the Lab: Securing Learning Systems in the Wild

Yigitcan Kaya
SecLab
UC Santa Barbara
 

5 February 2026 @ 2:00 pm PST
Zoom: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/87605586897?pwd=OSzSOE8UDAZgurC3acnzFdZlsWKpln.1

Summer Experiences at Rutgers 2025 Update

Updating our earlier account of ACTION summer research at Rutgers University, the project that William Guo (U Penn) and Edward Xiong (MIT) worked on in summer 2025 led to a paper that has just been accepted at the International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS'26). 

Summer Internships with DHS Science and Technology

Through our relationship with DHS, ACTION has been notified about three separate opportunities for summer internships for high school, undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate students. 

PRISM Workshop at NDSS 2026

NDSS 2026 will feature a colocated workshop on Attack Provenance, Reasoning, and Investigation for Security in the Monitored Environment (PRISM). One of the workshops co-chairs is Purdue professor Z. Berkay Celik. Christopher Kruegel from UCSB sits on the steering committee. Palo Alto Networks will sponsor the Best Paper Award.

PRISM could be a relevant outlet for many ACTION researchers. From the workshop website:

ACTION Researchers in The Atlantic

Giovanni Vigna and Dawn Song were interviewed for an article in The Atlantic by Matteo Wong titled "Chatbots are Becoming Really, Really Good Criminals."

Wenbo Guo, Invited Lecture

Agentic Systems for Software Engineering and Security Applications

Wenbo Guo
Computer Science
UC Santa Barbara

Time: 11:15 am - 12:30 pm PT
Date: 10 December 2025
Location: Harold Frank Hall, room 1132, UC Santa Barbara campus 
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvuHSNu0ngM