News

2024 iCTF Wraps Up After Six Days of Competition

The 2024 International Capture The Flag (iCTF) competition concluded today, November 22, at 4:00 PM, after six days of challenges that tested participants' cybersecurity skills. Running from November 16, this year’s iCTF brought together high school and undergraduate teams from around the world.

Competition Highlights

High School Division

Teams faced 28 challenges, submitted 280 flags, and performed 2,930 incorrect attempts. The top teams were:

iCTF 2024 Opening Play

The third day of iCTF opened amidst heavy competition.

A total of 48 teams have scored points, which includes 16 high school and 25 undergraduate teams. Players compete to solve a variety of challenges, with challenges ranging from hacking websites, fooling AI agents, reverse-engineering models, and fuzzy geographic feature search. High school players are currently hacking on 14 challenges, and undergraduate players are hacking on 13. Every challenge is solved by at least one team.

Patrick McDaniel, Distinguished Lecture at UIUC

Adversarial Machine Learning: A 10-year Perspective 

Patrick McDaniel

Cheng Xin and Kevin Lu at the DIMACS Center

Cheng Xin and Kevin Lu, students advised by Jie Gao, delivered flash talks inspired by their ACTION-related research at the DIMACS Workshop on Spreading on Social Networks – Theory and Applications, held at Rutgers University from October 21, 2024 - October 23, 2024. The event was co-sponsored by the Center for BioComplexity, High Meadows Environmental Institute, Princeton University and The Santa Fe Institute.

Abstracts for both presentations follow: 

Optimally Improving Cooperative Learning in a Social Setting

Cheng Xin

iCTF 2024 Training Materials

The iCTF 2024 will take place from November 16, 2024, at 10 am Pacific Time to November 22, 2024, at 4pm Pacific Time.

Salman Khan, How AI Will Revolutionize Education on Sat, Oct 5

The talk highlighted below is not sponsored by ACTION, but it is nonetheless topical. ACTION participants local to Santa Barbara will find it interesting. 

Brave New Words: How AI Will Revolutionize Education (and Why that's a Good Thing)

Salman Khan
Khan Academy

Invited lecture: Shuang Hao

Data-Driven Analytics to Empower Security and Protection in the AI Era

Shuang Hao, Professor
Department of Computer Science
University of Texas, Dallas

Date: Thursday, September 26
Place: Harold Frank Hall, Room 1132
Time: 1:30 pm PT
 

Abstract

Summer Experiences beyond Santa Barbara

In addition to the undergraduate projects supported by ACTION at UC Santa Barbara, Norfolk State University and Rutgers University  were bustling with summer internships.