News

Shinan Liu, ACTION Student Lecture

This is the first in the ACTION Institute's student-led presentations of 2025.

Weaving an Intelligent Net with More Connected, Accessible, and Reliable Machine Intelligence

Shinan Liu
University of Chicago

Patrick McDaniel, Distinguished Lecture for ACTION

Due to the overwhelming interest in Dr. McDaniel's talk at UIUC, he has agreed to return as a distinguished presenter for ACTION. The talk is now available on YouTube. 

The Challenges of Machine Learning in Adversarial Settings: A Systems Perspective

Patrick McDaniel
University of Wisconsin-Madison

Dec 5 @ 2:00 pm PT
Now available on YouTube: https://youtu.be/3yaY2q95A0E

Applications for 2025 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. 

WiCyS 2025 - ACTION wants you to go

The 2025 Women in Cyber Security (WiCyS) technical conference will take place in Dallas, TX from 2 April through 5 April 2025. ACTION wants to ensure that eligible students in our institute's community are able to attend this impactful event. 

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