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.
Day one (June 25) centered on the Institute's program review. The morning featured progress updates from ACTION's research thrusts. Radha Poovendran of the University of Washington delivered a status update on the AI research. Dongyan Xu, of Purdue University presented on use-inspired security research. The afternoon covered lightning talks introducing student posters, a session on ACTION's broader strategic impact (talent development, diversity, multidisciplinary collaboration, and knowledge transfer), a GATE platform demo, and a look ahead at ACTION in Year 4, including planned research projects. Dr. J.R. Rao from IBM gave some steering advice to the ACTION researchers during a community-building session, while Dr. Natalie Jones spoke about the opportunities available for programmatic evaluation and internal assessment. The day wrapped up with an all-institute dinner overlooking the Santa Barbara waterfront.
Day two (June 26) was the Knowledge Expo proper, beginning with an NSF/ACTION PI response to the NSF reviewers' unanswered questions and comments from the previous day. Dr. Glen Chou of Georgia Tech delivered a keynote, "Certified Learning, Control, and Diagnosis for Real-Time Trustworthy Robotics," discussing reachability-based methods for building verifiably safe robotic autonomy. A second invited talk, "Offensive Informs Defensive: Building the Next Generation of Autonomous Defense," came from Kerri Prinos of Horizon3.ai, covering AI-driven attacker/defender research and a new evaluation framework for autonomous cyber defense agents. Between talks, students presented posters over lunch. The event closed with final remarks on the Institute's future, followed by a hike and a group dinner in downtown Santa Barbara.
Student research on display spanned 19 posters covering topics like continual learning, LLM safety benchmarking, adversarial attacks on AI agents, automated vulnerability discovery and exploitation, and cybersecurity education outreach. A single PDF containing all of the graduate student posters can be viewed on Box here: https://ucsb.box.com/s/zbr9zwd02iz1a0utalj67rhhyioxloom
A full agenda of the ACTION Annual Review of Knowledge Expo is available here: https://action.ucsb.edu/2026-action-annual-review-and-knowledge-expo