Campus Spotlight
"Privacy is about how we live our lives. It doesn’t just touch criminals and famous people."
—Pegah Parsi, Chief Privacy Officer, UC San Diego
Privacy 101 Workshop: A Global, Live Training
Why does privacy matter? How does it relate to legal compli-ance, personal civil rights, and data practices? The Privacy 101 Workshop, a flagship privacy training that draws audiences worldwide, covers these topics and so much more. Since online privacy touches every aspect of life, this three-hour workshop is designed for anyone in any profession. Attendees learn about the four foundational types of privacy, the history and importance of privacy and data ethics, key privacy principles, privacy laws applicable to higher education, and practical steps to protect data at work and our own privacy.
1,700 Attendees since 2020 inception
Privacy @ UC San Diego Course: On-Demand
Based on the hugely popular Privacy 101 Workshop, the one-hour Privacy @ UC San Diego course was created in 2023 and is available on-demand via UC Learning. The training focuses on basic data privacy principles, relevant legislation, and UC policies applicable to campus activities. Those who work with personal data at P3 or above at UC San Diego are required to take the course. In the future, this course may be available to others out-side of the university.
300+ Attendees since its May launch
"Beyond FERPA - 45 minutes of an intense overview of the privacy compliance landscape, done masterfully."
—Privacy @ UC San Diego Training Participant
"AI is used routinely now for things like malware analysis to identify malicious documents and malicious webpages. What we don’t have are entities that are capable of reasoning. This is an opportunity to bring artificial intelligence and security together in a novel way."
—Professor Giovanni Vigna, UC Santa Barbara
UC Santa Barbara is leading a $20 million research institute for next-level AI-powered cybersecurity. The National Science Foundation-funded Institute for Agent-based Cyber Threat Intelligence and Operation (ACTION) is an effort to bring continuous learning and reasoning of AI to security threats. Professor Giovanni Vigna, a computer science professor and cybersecurity expert at UC Santa Barbara, heads the multidisciplinary five-year project. Vigna is joined by UC Santa Barbara colleagues Chris Kruegel, João Hespanha, and Ambuj Singh, as well as more than 20 collaborators from UC Berkeley, Purdue University, Georgia Tech, The University of Chicago, University of Washington, University of Illinois Chicago, Rutgers, Norfolk State University, University of Illinois, and University of Virginia.
Singh, whose research involves AI/human interactions, said merging AI with human expertise is a best-of-both-worlds security scenario. “Building a joint human-AI system that complements each other with capabilities, such as presenting a human expert with risk-reward options derived from an AI-learned model, are some of the ways in which the institute will lead the frontier of future research in AI cybersecurity.”
The research plan involves combining foundational AI with cyber-security. An AI “stack” contains layers of functionality to support AI in various ways, including learning and reasoning with domain knowledge, human-agent interaction, multi-agent collaboration, and strategic gaming and tactical planning. These AI domains enable the creation of “agents” that will be able to assess and identify a potential attack, as well as identify the attacker and take action for recovery.
Per the National Science Foundation’s website, the directors of the 25 AI Institutes presented their research on September 19, 2023, on Capital Hill “to enable congressional staff to learn more about the amazing research and technologies that are being developed at these AI Institutes.”
Vigna said, “There is increased interest from lawmakers on AI-related issues in general and cybersecurity in particular. The advantages that stem from using autonomous intelligent agents to secure the nation’s critical infrastructure are clear: AI-enabled terminologies will address the scale and time requirements for effective response to sophisticated attacks.”