Workshop on AI Integration in Businesses - A Perspective on Efficiency VS Security Risks

AI integration has revolutionized industries by enabling automation, intelligent decisionmaking, and predictive analytics across finance, healthcare, manufacturing, and cybersecurity. While enhancing efficiency and innovation, it also introduces security risks, including adversarial attacks, data privacy threats, and model vulnerabilities. As AI becomes critical to business operations, securing models, infrastructure, and data is essential to prevent financial losses, disruptions, and regulatory breaches. Traditional security measures struggle to detect emerging threats like side- and covert-channel attacks, firmware backdoors, speculative execution flaws, and hardware Trojans, increasing the risk of data breaches. Developing AI-driven cybersecurity solutions is vital to ensuring the resilience and security of AI-integrated systems.

In this backdrop, the University of Queensland (UQ), in collaboration with the University of Exeter (UoE), UK, and with support from QUEX Institute, is organising a workshop at the UQ Brisbane with a focus on the use of AI to tackle cybersecurity challenges in modern computing infrastructure that embeds generative AI across various software and hardware design layers. The workshop will have a strong business orientation by ensuring that the relevant industry partners and speakers are engaged in conversation with the academics from both UQ and UoE. The core idea for organising this workshop is to have an industrial/business perspective on the use of AI within the context of cybersecurity and listen to what kind of challenges the industry is facing with AI and its implementation.

The workshop will include a keynote talk from an eminent academic/industry speaker in the broader domain of cybersecurity, followed up by a joint panel discussion between industrial and academic representatives. The workshop will also include research talks from experienced academics and early career researchers (ECRs) to reflect on the current state of research and development efforts that address existing, renewed, and emerging industrial cybersecurity challenges in the age of AI.

Organisers:

• Priyanka Singh, Lecturer in Cybersecurity, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia
• Khurram Bhatti, Associate Professor in Cybersecurity, University of Exeter, UK

Full Program: