Narratives, policies, and innovations in AI are often tied up with notions of “security”. While our increasingly AI-mediated social world is vulnerable to different forms of cyber threats, “security” also serves as justification for large-scale surveillance of already over-policed and oppressed communities. The event featured Laura Norén, Ram Shankar Siva Kumar, Newton Campbell, and Mona Sloane and examined links between the topics of algorithmic harm, national security, and cybersecurity, and to ask what – or who – counts as “risk” or as “threat” in the context of AI.

Laura Norén is VP of Privacy and Trust at Obsidian Security, a cybersecurity startup based in Newport Beach where she runs privacy operations. Norén is a frequent speaker on data ethics, privacy legislation, and the social impact of data-driven technologies. She continues to lecture at universities and publish in academic journals as well as in the popular press. She holds undergraduate degrees from MIT and a PhD from NYU where she completed a Moore-Sloan postdoc at the Center for Data Science.

Ram Shankar Siva Kumar is a Data Cowboy in Azure Trustworthy ML initiative at Microsoft focusing on securing ML systems from adversaries.  His work has appeared in industry venues like RSA, Defcon, BlueHat, DerbyCon, MIRCon, Infiltrate, Strata+Hadoop and academic venues and workshops at NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, IEEE S&P, ACM-CCS and Harvard Business Review. He is the founder of Security Data Science Colloquium—the only avenue where ML engineers from every major cloud security team congregate; and the co-founder of Adversarial ML Threat Matrix, the first industry initiative to secure ML systems. He graduated with two separate master’s degrees from Carnegie Mellon University and is currently a Technical Advisory Board Member at University of Washington. He is also an affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University.

Newton Campbell is a Computer Scientist specializing in artificial intelligence. Through SAIC, he currently serves as an Artificial Intelligence subject matter expert on the NASA Langley Research Center OCIO Data Science Team. There, he leads the development of several programs in urban air mobility, geomagnetism, virtual reality, and high-performance computing for Earth Sciences. Prior to NASA, Dr. Campbell spent 10 years doing research and development in support of the US Department of Defense and Intelligence Communities. In that capacity, he served as the Principal Investigator and technical lead of multiple cybersecurity and artificial intelligence projects, with specific focus on Internet Privacy and Cyber-Physical Systems. Dr. Campbell completed his PhD in Computer Science at Nova Southeastern University. He regularly coordinates STEM activities with schools and media groups in the Baltimore-Washington Metropolitan area. He is an active member of the Planetary Society, the Philosophical Society of Washington, and IEEE. He is a member of the Schusterman Foundation REALITY network, the Australian-American Leadership Dialogue, and the French-American Foundation, representing Young US technology leaders.

The event was moderated by Mona Sloane and supported by NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge, the NYU Center for Responsible AI and the 370 Jay Project.