Deadline: February 7, 2022 (11:58pm PDT)

Full details: https://c3dti.ai/research/ai-for-cybersecurity-and-critical-infrastructure/

The C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute invites scholars, software developers, and researchers to advance the science of digital transformation with artificial intelligence (AI) designed to harden information security (Infosec) and secure critical infrastructure.

The pace, volume, and sophistication of attacks against our information infrastructure, networks, and our critical infrastructures are accelerating leading to substantive hacking, disruptions, and penetrations of our government, defense, and private sector information systems and energy, telecommunications, financial, water, and other critical infrastructures.

Advanced AI/ML techniques present an opportunity to bring new tools and methods to detect, explain, and respond to previously unknown attack vectors, leading to better security of IT systems, OT systems, and critical infrastructures.

Areas of interest to this call include but are not limited to:

1. AI techniques to identify previously unknown malware, ransomware, and zero-day vulnerabilities, enabling isolation and neutralization
2. AI-enabled network and system crawlers that can continuously search and identify persistent access mechanisms (backdoors), bots, remote access toolkits (RATS), stagers, and Trojans
3. AI forensics and attribution techniques to identify sources of attacks
4. AI techniques to automate simulated adversarial attacks to identify system and network vulnerabilities
5. AI techniques to accurately identify and enable the neutralization of phishing attacks
6. Change management techniques to prevent the weaponization of innocent insiders
7. AI techniques to detect the presence of advanced persistent threats and insider threats
8. AI-enabled network and/or system crawlers that access and continuously evaluate system security levels
9. AI techniques, perhaps in supervised or unsupervised learning, to provide early detection of system and/or network anomalies that might be indicative of unauthorized access, denial of service, or data exfiltration
10. Techniques and methods to enable the development of AI algorithms that are resilient to adversarial attacks
11. AI techniques to identify concentration risk in the software and computer supply chain
12. Change management to transform organizational behavior to manifest best practices in cyber hygiene
13. Techniques to respond to attacks at the organizational and societal level.

ALGORITHMS AND SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT