News

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. 

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. 

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.

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

Thijs van Ede, Invited Lecture for ACTION

Data-driven security operations - The advantages and limitations of AI

Thijs van Ede
Semantics, Cybersecurity, and Services Group
University of Twente
The Netherlands

May 9 @ 11:30 am PT

https://youtu.be/1MRYB5r3byw

Orcutt Academy Cybersecurity Students Visit UCSB’s SecLab and ACTION Institute

May 2, 2025 --  UCSB hosted students from the cybersecurity class at Orcutt Academy High School in Orcutt, California, along with their teachers and chaperones, Heather Penk and John Dell'Armo. The visiting students kicked off their day with a campus tour of UC Santa Barbara, followed by interactive presentations led by researchers from UCSB's SecLab and the ACTION Institute.

Kruegel receives UCSB Outstanding Mentoring Award for 2024-25

UCSB Computer Science professor Christopher Kruegel received one of three Outstanding Graduate Mentor Awards for 2024-’25 academic year