C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute announces call for proposals

On December 21, the C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute announced that it 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.

“Cybersecurity is an existential issue,” said Thomas Siebel, chairman and CEO of C3 AI, a leading enterprise AI software provider. “We are assembling the best minds on the planet to develop innovative AI to attain a step-function improvement in securing IT, OT, and critical infrastructure systems.”

“Advanced AI and machine learning offer the best opportunity to design robust defensive systems,” said C3.ai DTI Co-Director S. Shankar Sastry of UC Berkeley, whose area of research expertise is cybersecurity. “This call for proposals will help design the defenses necessary to securely shield the digital transformation of our economy.”

“We aim to develop AI techniques to identify and neutralize malware, ransomware, phishing attacks, and prevent the weaponization of innocent insiders,” said C3.ai DTI Co-Director R. Srikant of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, an expert in AI and networks.

Immediate Call for Proposals: AI to Transform Cybersecurity and Secure Critical Infrastructure.
Topics for research awards may include, but are not limited to, the following:

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

This third call for proposals is open now, with a submission deadline of February 7, 2022. Researchers are invited to learn more about C3.ai DTI and how to submit their proposals for consideration at C3DTI.ai. Award winners will be announced in March 2022, with a start date around June 1, 2022. Award winners may take part in the annual C3.ai DTI Research Symposium, to be held March 22-24, 2022, in Miami, FL.

Source: C3.ai

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