News

ACTION researchers win the Amazon Nova AI Challenge

After a head-to-head tournament designed to test the safety of AI coding models under adversarial conditions, Team PurpCorn-PLAN from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign was named the winning defending team in the first-ever Amazon Nova AI Challenge. PurpCorn-PLAN's roster includes ACTION researchers Hadjer Benkraouda, a PhD student at UIUC and the Institute's new Student Advisory Council co-lead, and Gang Wang, Professor of Computer Science at UIUC and co-PI of the Institute. 

ACTION at the Special Competitive Studies Project AI+Expo

The U.S. National Science Foundation hosted a booth at the 2025 Special Studies Project AI+Expo at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C. from June 2-4, 2025.

Yigitcan Kaya, UCSB AI Meetup Series

AI Meetups are series of seminars organized by REAL AI at UCSB, "a consortium of researchers building Artificial Scientific Intelligence (ASI)." The topic of the meetup described below stems from work undertaken during Summer 2024 by ACTION AI Interns at UCSB. Dr. Yigitcan Kaya mentored the students during the research experience.

When AI Meets the Web: Prompt Injection Risks in Third-Party AI Chatbot Plugins

Yigitcan Kaya
SecLab
UC Santa Barbara
 

May 30 @ 2:30 pm PT

Thijs van Ede, Invited Lecture for ACTION

Data-driven security operations - The advantages and limitations of AI

Thijs van Ede
Semantics, Cybersecurity, and Services Group
University of Twente
The Netherlands

May 9 @ 11:30 am PT

https://youtu.be/1MRYB5r3byw

Kruegel receives UCSB Outstanding Mentoring Award for 2024-25

UCSB Computer Science professor Christopher Kruegel received one of three Outstanding Graduate Mentor Awards for 2024-’25 academic year

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. 

UIUC's SAIL 2025

UIUC PhD student Hadjer Benkraouda brought ACTION's educational outreach to SAIL, an annual outreach event organized by Computer Science students and staff. SAIL's primary purpose is to introduce high school students to the field of computer science and provide them with a a glimpse into to student life at UIUC's College of Engineering.

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.