L3Harris Institute for Assured Information Hosts Cyber Defense Workshop

Adam Lowenstein September 12, 2023

L3Harris Institute for Assured Information at Florida Tech recently hosted the 2nd International Workshop on Adaptive Cyber Defense.

Bringing together more than two dozen attendees from the research, government and industry communities, the Aug. 16-18 workshop at the university’s Center for Advanced Manufacturing and Innovative Design was comprised of technical presentations, a panel discussion focused on open problems and potential research solutions, and lightning talks.

Much of the research under discussion explores unique applications of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) as foundational capabilities for the pursuit of adaptive cyber defense. The cyber domain cannot currently be reliably and effectively defended without extensive reliance on human experts, but skilled cyber defenders are in short supply and often cannot respond fast enough to cyber threats.

Efforts to create semi-autonomous cyber defenses that can learn to recognize and respond to cyberattacks or discover and mitigate weaknesses in cooperation with other cyber operation systems and human experts must be accelerated. 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.

Co-Chairs for this year’s ACD 2023 Workshop were Marco Carvalho, professor and executive director of the L3Harris Institute for Assured Information; Dr. Damian Marriott, Defence Science and Technology Group (Alumnus), Australia; Dr. Mark Bilinski, Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific, USA; and Dr. Ahmad Ridley, Laboratory for Advanced Cybersecurity Research, USA.

“We are honored to have had the opportunity to host this important event at Florida Tech,” Carvalho said. “Congratulations to all attendees and the L3HIAI team for another successful event.”

Keynote presentations were given by Tejas Patel, program manager at DARPA, and Rajarathnam Chandramouli, CEO at Spectronn.

Additionally, among the invited paper presentations was one from L3HIAI graduate students Atefeh Mahdavi and Neda Keivandarian. They presented, “Adaptive Attack Detection in Text Classification: Leveraging Space Exploration Features for Text Sentiment Classification.”