News

Best Grad Poster at WiCys 2025

Congratulations to Hadjer Benkraouda, a PhD student at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign who is advised by Gang Wang in Computer Science, for her poster titled "Data-Code Separation for Non-Standard ARM Binaries using Pseudo Labels." 

Hadjer presented this work at at the 2025 Women in Cybersecurity Conference (WiCys) and won the 2025 Student Research Poster Award in the Graduate Poster category. WiCys 2025 took place in Dallas, Texas from April 2-5, 2025.

Hadjer also presented this work at the ACTION Year 1 Site Visit in June 2024. 

ACTION participation in US/Sweden Technical Exchange

Representatives from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) invited ACTION researchers to their quarterly technical exchange with the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency (MSB) on the security and resilience of cyber-physical-human systems, with a special eye towards critical infrastructures. 

ACTION at the Billington State and Local CyberSecurity Summit

Billington CyberSecurity organizers invited Professor Wenke Lee to their 2025 State and Local CyberSecurity Summit to present on ACTION activities during a panel titled "AI on the Cybersecurity Frontier: Cutting Edge R&D at Academia." Dr. Lee gave an overview of the participating institutions, mission and goals, project selection criteria, connections to state/local governments, impacts, etc. He also discussed how one cannot have blind trust in any single AI agent.

Diyi Yang, Distinguished Lecture for ACTION

Enabling and Evaluating Human-Agent Collaboration

Diyi Yang
Computer Science
Stanford University

Feb 10 @ 12:00 pm PT
YouTube link: https://youtu.be/xawp_Pkx2DE

ACTION at CARTA Workshop 2025

Representing ACTION, Dongyan Xu served on a research panel that discussed digital twin development and application in industry, academia and government labs. Xu shared his experiences and observations in creating multi-aspect, multi-fidelity digital twins for critical infrastructure modeling, simulation, and security/resiliency assessment, based on his current research efforts under ACTION and other relevant projects.

Shinan Liu, ACTION Student Lecture

This is the first in the ACTION Institute's student-led presentations of 2025.

Weaving an Intelligent Net with More Connected, Accessible, and Reliable Machine Intelligence

Shinan Liu
University of Chicago

ACTION at ACSAC 2024

Representing ACTION, Dongyan Xu served on the panel as an academia panelist participating in a USG-funded research project on both AI and cybersecurity. Xu gave an overview of ACTION's mission, vision, and technical approaches and expected impacts, providing concrete testimony on the challenges and opportunities in "AI for security" and "security for AI" and how ACTION is addressing these challenges and opportunities in a cross-domain (AI and cybersecurity), agent-centric methodology.

Patrick McDaniel, Distinguished Lecture for ACTION

Due to the overwhelming interest in Dr. McDaniel's talk at UIUC, he has agreed to return as a distinguished presenter for ACTION. The talk is now available on YouTube. 

The Challenges of Machine Learning in Adversarial Settings: A Systems Perspective

Patrick McDaniel
University of Wisconsin-Madison

Dec 5 @ 2:00 pm PT
Now available on YouTube: https://youtu.be/3yaY2q95A0E