The promises of artificial intelligence (AI) have fueled imaginations among members of the media and business communities: AI offers the chance to remove tedious tasks, speed creativity, and analyze oceans of data in a matter of seconds.
But Patrick McDaniel is also concerned with the challenges AI poses, especially to security. McDaniel works in the UW’s recently created School of Computer, Data, & Information Sciences, where he serves as the Tsun-Ming Shih Professor of Computer Sciences. His list of credentials is long: fellow of the prestigious Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and American Association for the Advancement of Science; recipient of the Hall of Fame Award from ACM’s Special Interest Group on Operating Systems and the Outstanding Innovation Award from ACM’s Special Interest Group on Security, Accounting, and Control; director of the National Science Foundation’s Frontier Center for Trustworthy Machine Learning. He also served as the program manager and lead scientist for the Army Research Laboratory’s Cyber-Security Collaborative Research Alliance from 2013 to 2018. McDaniel came to the UW in 2022, and before that, he was the William L. Weiss Professor of Information and Communications Technology and Director of the Institute for Networking and Security Research at Pennsylvania State University.
On April 16, he joins The UW Now Livestream for a conversation about AI and how it can make life better — or how it poses challenges to security.
Chief Area of Expertise:
My research focuses on a wide range of topics in computer and network security and technical public policy, with interests in mobile device security, the security of AI, systems, program analysis for security, sustainability, and election systems.
On The UW Now, I’ll Discuss:
The security of AI and what people should be thinking about.
The One Thing I Want Viewers to Remember Is:
AI is fragile and breaks, and that can be exploited by people who would harm users.
To Get Smart Fast, Read:
This article from Carnegie Mellon University explains what AI is, and the National Security Commission on AI Intelligence explains AI strategy.
