News

ACTION Benchmarks Used in Industry

Yuetai Li, a PhD student at the University of Washington, who is working with Prof. Radha Poovendran and ACTION undergraduates Brian Lee from the University of Chicago and Kayla Xu from Northwestern, helped build two AI evaluation benchmarks: JobBench and Agents' Last Exam. Today, both of those benchmarks were name-dropped in the same-day flagship model launches from Meta and OpenAI.

Inaugural Workshop on Agentic AI in Offensive and Defensive Cyber Operations (AIDC'26)

ACTION researchers have organized the inaugural Workshop on Agentic AI in Offensive and Defensive Cyber Operations (AIDC'26), to be held in conjunction with the 2026 Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC 2026) in December in Los Angeles, CA.

ACM AI Leadership Summit 2026

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) AI Leadership Summit is a collaborative effort to convene researchers, practitioners, industry leaders, educators, and policymakers to explore how AI can be developed and deployed responsibly to advance science and society.

ACTION's Third Annual Review and Knowledge Expo

The ACTION AI Institute hosted its third annual review and Knowledge Expo on June 25–26, 2026, at UC Santa Barbara's Henley Hall.

Representatives from all twelve ACTION campuses participated in the event and showcased the Institute's achievements over the past twelve months. Also in attendance were representatives from each of ACTION's stakeholder organizations: the U.S. National Science Foundation; the Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Division; and IBM. 

Webinar: Implications of AI for Cybersecurity

On June 24, the National Academies will release Implications of Recent Advancements in Artificial Intelligence for Cybersecurity, a rapid expert consultation that examines how recent advances in generative AI and agentic

ACTION at the UC AI Steering Committee

Giovanni Vigna represented ACTION at the inaugural meeting of the University of California's AI Steering Committee, held on June 8th. The gathering brought together leaders from across UC's campuses, health system, and national laboratories for a full day of conversation about how our institution should approach artificial intelligence.

Across two breakout groups, several themes emerged with strong consensus:

Elisa Bertino named as ACM President

Dr. Elisa Bertino was elected to a two-year term as president of the Association for Computing Machinery beginning July 1, 2026. 

Dr. Bertino has been a leading ACTION faculty researcher since the institute's inception in 2023. Since 2024 she has been the lead for our research in the area of intelligent agents for response and recovery. 

SAC visit to UC Santa Barbara

Saastha Vasan hosted Chase Jiang and Elena Long for a visit to UC Santa Barbara as part of the ACTION Student Advisory Council student exchange. While here, Chase, who is from the University of Chicago, and Elena, from the University of Virginia, had a chance to learn about the wealth of research activities underway in UCSB's SecLab. 

We hope to hold similar opportunities for cross-pollination at all of our ACTION campuses in 2026-2027.