News

UCSB Summer Undergraduate Research Symposium 2025

On August 14, 2024, ACTION AI was one of fifteen undergraduate summer research programs across UC Santa Barbara gathered for a research symposium and poster session. In total, there were 65 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.

ACTION AI Institute Research Powers Team Shellphish to Landmark Success at DEF CON 33

LAS VEGAS, NV – At the conclusion of the high-stakes DARPA AI Cyber Challenge (AIxCC) at DEF CON 33, Team Shellphish successfully debuted ARTIPHISHELL, an autonomous Cyber Reasoning System (CRS) built upon foundational research from the ACTION AI Institute (AI Institute for Agent-based Cyber Threat Intelligence and Operation).

Summer Experiences at Norfolk State 2025

Last week Norfolk State University hosted their first ACTION-sponsored Capture the Flag training camps. They held a day camp from 9 am - 4 pm and a night camp from 6 pm - 9 pm, both at the campus Cybersecurity Complex. 

Summer Experiences at Rutgers 2025

At Rutgers University, two REU students worked on topics related to ACTION in Summer 2025. William Guo (U Penn) and Edward Xiong (MIT) joined Professor Jie Gao on a project that models learning in a social network. The project will impact downstream ACTION research, for instance in groups of agents tasked with network defense. 

ACTION at the NITRD CSIA Working Group

Giovanni Vigna delivered an invited talk to the Cyber Security and Information Assurance Interagency Working Group (CSIA WG), the Federal Government’s group for coordinating federal investments and activities in cybersecurity R&D. This IWG is one of the coordinating groups of the Federal NITRD Program (https://nitrd.gov/). Throughout the year, the group explores a variety of topics, in order to coordinate federal research activities and to better understand what federally funded research in cybersecurity is needed.

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. 

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

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.