2023-05-19: CCI Symposium Trip Report April 17-18, 2023

 

Members of the Commonwealth Cyber Initiative and invited guests gathered at the second annual CCI Symposium April 17 to 18, 2023, in Richmond, VA.

Dr. Luiz DaSilva, executive director of the Commonwealth Cyber Initiative, presented the State of CCI speech at the 2022 CCI Symposium.

In his speech, Dr. Silva mentioned the selected proposals for the “Securing Interactions between Humans and Machines” call this year.

In a later workshop, funded projects from Virginia universities presented a short briefing on their projects. As the PI of one of the projects, I presented our research work on counter human smuggling. This is a collaborative work between Dr. Faryaneh Poursardar, Dr. Vikas Ashok from ODU CS, and Dr. Erika Frydenlund from VMASC. Intentional misinformation and/or disinformation can play a large part in humanitarian crises involving human smuggling and trafficking.

Human smugglers (also known as coyotes on the U.S. southern border) often advertise on social media, sometimes presenting posts that appear to represent legitimate travel agencies or companies, with subtle visual or textual cues indicating that services include assistance to illegally cross a border. You can read more about our work on the CCI webpage and related WSDL blog post.

The keynote speaker for the event was André Mendes, chief information officer at the U.S. Department of Commerce. He discussed cybersecurity innovation and workforce development, and academic opportunities with the CHIPS and Science Act.

In Fireside Chat on Cyber Investment session, Sarah Hayes , Director of Innovation and Workforce Development for CCI, talked with Josh Miller, an Investment Manager with Blu Venture Investors, and Seda Goff, Founder and General Partner of Flintlock Capital. They discussed the current landscape of cyber startup investment, as well as opportunities and how to avoid common pitfalls with technology commercialization.

In Tech Talk on Bias in AI session, Laura Freeman, director of the Intelligent Systems Lab in the Hume Center for National Security and Technology, talked with Ben Harvey, CEO and founder of AI Squared. The discussion was on how data and societal bias are impacting trust and acceptance of AI research, algorithms, and assumptions.

Dominik Soos presented in the student poster session. He is a CS undergraduate and a member of the WSDL research group and works under Dr. Jian Wu’s guidance. He was also one of ten people who joined the CCI 5K run. This year 58 posters participated in the symposium.

We had a good number of WSDL research group representatives in the symposium: Dr. Vikas Ashok, Dr. Jian Wu, Dominik Soos, and me.

--Faryaneh Poursardar (@Faryane)