AI and Cybersecurity: From Defensive Intelligence to Securing AI Systems

Abstract: 

The rapid adoption of AI agents, autonomous systems, and large-scale machine learning pipelines is fundamentally reshaping the cybersecurity landscape. AI is increasingly embedded both as a defensive tool: used to detect threats, anomalies, and attacks at machine speed, and as a new attack surface, introducing novel risks related to model integrity, data poisoning, adversarial inputs, and autonomous decision-making.

This talk examines how AI is being deployed across modern cybersecurity systems, including network, cloud, and IoT security, and analyzes the unique technical challenges that arise when applying AI in adversarial environments. We discuss where AI techniques have proven effective in real-world deployments, where they fail, and why traditional security assumptions often break down when models operate under uncertainty, limited visibility, or active evasion.

The talk also explores emerging security challenges introduced by AI-native systems themselves, including securing AI pipelines, protecting models and data at scale, and defending against AI-enabled attacks. Through concrete industry examples drawn from large-scale enterprise and IoT environments, we highlight key lessons learned and outline future directions for building robust, trustworthy, and secure AI-driven systems.

Bio: 

Dr. May Wang is Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for Internet of Things (IoT) Security at Palo Alto Networks, where she leads research and innovation at the intersection of AI and cybersecurity. She is a co-founder of Zingbox, the industry’s first AI-powered IoT security company, which was acquired by Palo Alto Networks in 2019.

Prior to Zingbox, Dr. Wang was a Principal Architect in the Cisco CTO Office, where her research and algorithms, originating from her Ph.D. work, were deployed in multiple large-scale network and security products for real-time threat detection and analysis. Her work spans machine learning, network security, data analysis, and adversarial AI.

Dr. Wang has served on the boards of public, private, and nonprofit organizations. She holds a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and a B.S. in Physics from Peking University. She is an inventor on over 100 patents and was recognized with numerous honors, including VentureBeat’s 2023 AI Entrepreneur of the Year.