Proposers
Dr. Mark Bilinski, Prof. Marco Carvalho, Dr. Ahmad Ridley and Dr. Damian Marriott
Workshop Code
Please use the following code when submitting your paper to this Workshop: W6-ACD
Summary
We believe this workshop proposal will bolster the growing field of AI/ML in Cyber Security at 2026 IEEE CAI, continuing the momentum from last year. The co-chairs have significant experience in organizing related workshops and together with the program committee bring significant expertise in AI and Cyber. At the first ACD workshop in 2021 we launched the first CAGE (Cyber Autonomy Gym for Experimentation) Challenge. There has been growing interest in successive challenges and their results. We announced the fourth challenge at last year’s workshop and this year’s proposed workshop will heavily feature the results and possibly announce the next challenge.
Scope and Aims
Building on recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) the Cyber defense research community has been motivated to develop new dynamic and sustainable defenses through adaptive cyber defense. The cyber domain cannot currently be reliably and effectively defended without extensive reliance on human experts. Skilled cyber defenders are in short supply and often cannot respond fast enough to cyber threats. With the growing adoption of AI and ML techniques to both cyber and non-cyber settings, there is an increasing need to bridge the critical gap between AI and Cyber research and practitioners. We must accelerate our efforts to create cyber defenses that can learn to recognize and respond to cyber attacks or discover and mitigate weaknesses in cooperation with other cyber operation systems and human experts. Furthermore, these defenses must be adaptive, and able to evolve over time to take into account changes in attacker behavior, benign changes in the systems, and expected drift in user behavior over time. The ACD Workshop will focus on sharing research that explores unique applications of AI and ML as an emerging technology underpinning foundational capabilities of adaptive cyber defense. The Workshop will be comprised of invited and accepted technical presentations, and a panel discussion focused on open problems and potential research solutions. This domain consists of challenging problems of critical importance to national and global security. Participation in this workshop will offer potentially unprecedented opportunities to stimulate research and innovation in this area.
Content and Objectives
The main objective of this proposal is to bring together both the research community and the government and industry communities to exchange experiences, discuss challenges and propose research directions. The workshop would consist of technical presentations (invited and accepted paper speakers will share their thoughts and experience on adaptive cyber defense); Academic-Industry-Government research direction discussion (top researchers in the area from academic, industry and government will discuss the current and future challenges in this area); Challenge problems (Academic challenge event results).