Understanding AI Threats to the Chem-Bio-Nuclear World

Join us for a morning of presentations and discussion highlighting the work of the Northwestern Security & AI Lab (NSAIL), which is jointly housed at Northwestern’s Roberta Buffett Institute for Global Affairs and McCormick School of Engineering, and NSAIL’s partners, Georgetown University’s Security Studies Program and the Netherlands Defence Academy. As advances in AI transform fields ranging from art and literature to protein design, materials science, and drone threats, they also introduce serious risks. Malicious actors and rogue states may seek to exploit AI for phishing, malware generation, intellectual property theft, and even the development of dangerous biological or chemical agents.

The workshop addresses how organizations can safeguard training data, protect AI models and trade secrets, mitigate drone threats, and deter misuse of their technologies. In addition to a robust presentation of threats, both cyber and kinetic, we will describe several threat-specific mitigation methods. Speakers will also present their Counterproliferation Triad (People, Processes, and Technology), a general mitigation framework developed under funding from the US Department of State, to help ensure AI advances serve the public good while mitigating potential harm.

The presentations and demonstrations will feature principal investigators V.S. Subrahmanian, head of NSAIL, Walter P. Murphy Professor of Computer Science, and Buffett Faculty Fellow at Northwestern; Daniel Byman, Professor at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service and Director of the Warfare, Irregular Threats, & Terrorism Program at the Center for Strategic & International Studies; and Roy Lindelauf, Endowed Chair of Data Science for Safety & Security at Tilburg and Chair of Data Science in Military Operations at the Netherlands Defence Academy, as well as NSAIL postdoctoral research scholar Marco Postiglione.

If you prefer to attend the event virtually over Zoom, you can register at .

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Host or Publisher Northwestern Buffett Institute for Global Affairs