News

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

Applications for 2026 Summer Research Program

As part of the ACTION AI Institute's plan for outreach, education, and broadening participation, we are now welcoming applications from both graduate and undergraduate students to participate in an 8-week research experience at one of the ACTION Institute campuses. Selected students will collaborate as teams with ACTION personnel on research related to Computer Security and Artificial Intelligence.  Participants will receive stipends, provided by the National Science Foundation, including a housing allocation. 

IBM blog hails TOUCAN as new goldmine for tool-calling AI agents

An IBM blog post authored by Kim Martineau highlights how TOUCAN, a tool-calling dataset "of 1.5 million task scenarios, field-tested and open-sourced by IBM and University of Washington, is designed to improve how agents interact with the world and get things done." 

Keynote at ACM CCS by Giovanni Vigna

ACTION Director Giovanni Vigna delivered the first keynote talk at 2025 ACM CCS in Taipei, Taiwan. 

Autonomous Vulnerability Analysis, Triaging, and Repair: A Historical Perspective

Giovanni Vigna
​​​​​​UC Santa Barbara

The software components that support critical infrastructure are riddled with vulnerabilities, whose exploitation could cause service disruption, financial damage, and possibly loss of life.