Adaptive Cyber Defense

Workshop Details:  2025 IEEE Conference on Artificial Intelligence 

• Conference Schedule: 5-7 May 2025 (Workshop on 5 May)

• Location: Santa Clara, California, USA

• Registration: TBD through IEEE CAI

• Submissions: Easy Chair Specifying that the manuscript is intended for the ACD Workshop.  Papers must adhere to the same requirements as the main conference.  (Accepted workshop papers are published in the conference proceedings in the workshop section, available online via IEEE and indexed by IEEE Xplore)

  1. 1. 1. 1. • • Submission deadline: 15 January 2025 10 March 2025

                • Paper acceptance notification: 1 March 2025 1 April 2025

                • Camera-ready deadline: 7 March 2025 5 April 2025

                • Formatting guidelines, LaTeX styles, and Word template: Template (Select Conferences > Original Research > LaTeX or Word)

Each research paper should have at most 6 pages, including figures, tables and references.  A maximum of two extra pages per paper is allowed (i.e., up to 8 pages), but with an additional charge.  

Please note that IEEE CAI 2025 will pursue a double-blind review policy.  This policy applies to any supplementary or linked material as well, including code.     

According to IEEE Publications Regarding AI-Generated Text, the use of artificial intelligence (AI) generated text in an article shall be disclosed in the acknowledgements section of any paper submitted to an IEEE Conference or Periodical.  The sections of the paper that use AI-generated text shall have a citation to the AI system used to generate the text.

About the ACD Workshop

The International Workshop on Adaptive Cyber Defense was organized to share research that 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. Skilled cyber defenders are in short supply and often cannot respond fast enough to cyber threats.

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 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.  

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

• Autonomous and semi-autonomous reasoning and response for cyber domains

• Human-machine teaming for adaptive defense systems

• Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) for adaptive cyber defense environments

• Reasoning and course of action (COA) decision making in cyber operations

• Predictive analytics for proactive stance to cyber threats and opportunities

• Cognitive modeling of cyber defenders and attackers

• Multi-agent and distributed AI solutions for semi-autonomous collaboration for cyber operations

• Automated intrusion detection and response, including AI additions to Security Orchestration, Automation and Incident Response (SOAR)

• Moving target defenses with adaptive (rather than random) strategies

• Command and control for automated cyber response

• Cyber simulation environments developed for testing and validation of AI techniques

• Realistic models of human behavior in cyber domains

• Explorations of problem similarities between cyber and non-cyber domains

• Adaptive cyber defense use cases and issues with adoption

• Customized defenses based on observed attacker behavior

• Generative AI cyber security use cases

Content and Objectives

The main objective of this workshop 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 consists 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). 

Workshop Schedule

5 May 2025

https://cai.ieee.org/2025/program2025/ 

(Click on Workshops and then ACD)

Co-Chairs/Organizing Committee

Prof. Marco Carvalho, Florida Institute of Technology, USA

Dr. Damian Marriott, Defence Science and Technology Group (Alumnus), Australia

Dr. Mark Bilinski, Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific, USA

Dr. Ahmad Ridley, Laboratory for Advanced Cybersecurity Research, USA

Contact

All questions about the workshop should be directed to: adaptive.cyber.defense@gmail.com