Registration is open for the inaugural ACM AI Leadership Summit, taking place Aug. 31 through Sept. 2 at the Hyatt Regency Atlanta Hotel.
Georgia Tech and Atlanta-area college students, faculty, and others from the tech community interested in AI are invited to attend the summit to explore:
In addition to welcoming a wide range of perspectives on AI and society, the summit will serve as a venue for knowledge exchange, cross-sector dialogue, and community building among academia, industry, government, and other AI stakeholders.
“Artificial intelligence is transforming every dimension of human knowledge, creativity, and collaboration,” said ACM President-Elect Elisa Bertino, co-chair of the summit’s organizing committee.
“The ACM AI Leadership Summit will be a milestone event where the global computing community taps into the excitement of the moment while exploring the AI era from a whole range of perspectives.”
GT Computing Helps Lead the Effort
Georgia Tech’s College of Computing plays a key role in the summit. Several faculty members serve on the organizing committee.
GT Computing faculty organizers include Neha Kumar, general organizing co-chair; Mark Riedl, program co-chair; and Naveena Karusala, communications co-chair. Dean of Computing Vivek Sarkar serves as the event’s sponsorship chair.
All are ACM members. Kumar, Riedl, and Karusala are faculty members in the School of Interactive Computing.
“Atlanta is home to one of the nation's most dynamic technology communities, making this summit an unprecedented opportunity for our students, researchers, academics, and technology leaders to help shape the future of AI,” said Kumar.
“By bringing together experts from academic, industry, and governance backgrounds, we're creating a space for exchanging ideas, forming partnerships, and engaging the next generation of AI leaders with the challenges and opportunities that will define the field for years to come.”
In addition to helping organize the summit, the College is hosting a reception on Aug. 30, following a daylong doctoral consortium titled Nurturing Future AI Leaders.
“The summit reflects the growing need for cross-sector collaboration as AI technologies become increasingly influential across every aspect of society,” said Sarkar.
“It is designed to foster dialogue, interdisciplinary collaboration, and practical action that advances AI for the public good.”
Turing Award Laureates and AI Visionaries Take the Stage
ACM A.M. Turing Award Laureates Andrew Barto and Yann LeCun are scheduled to participate in the summit. They’re joined by Regents’ Professor Ellen Zegura and several other distinguished speakers on the summit’s three-day main program.
The program also includes keynotes, panels, and interactive sessions examining frontier AI technologies, governance and ethics, and workforce transformation.
Scheduled sessions include:
Additional programming will feature special-interest-group (SIG) tracks focusing on AI for infrastructure and systems, software development, societal impact, and education.
Showcasing Georgia Tech’s Expanding AI Leadership
The event coincides with the rapid expansion of AI research at Georgia Tech. College of Computing faculty and students are advancing work in trustworthy and responsible AI, robotics, computer vision, natural language processing, cybersecurity, healthcare applications, scientific discovery, and AI-driven education.
Researchers are also helping shape conversations about the societal implications of AI, including governance, ethics, transparency, and workforce development.
That breadth of expertise aligns with the summit’s mission to connect a spectrum of perspectives on the opportunities and challenges posed by AI.
“By convening experts from multiple disciplines and sectors, the summit aims to build a shared understanding of how AI can be developed and deployed responsibly while expanding human capability and strengthening society,” said Kumar.
Registration for the ACM AI Leadership Summit is open.
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]]>As fans around the world search for tickets to FIFA World Cup 2026 matches, a team of Georgia Tech students is working to make buying tickets to major events less stressful and more transparent.
DoorTix, a startup ticket-buying concierge founded by computer science major Arayna Saxena, industrial engineering major Shinhai Chen, and mechanical engineering major Dhruv Narang, helps users navigate the increasingly complex world of event ticketing. Earlier this year, the startup earned the People’s Choice Award at Georgia Tech’s InVenture Prize competition for its approach to combating dynamic pricing and improving access to live events.
The Problem
Whether fans are trying to attend a sporting event or a concert, the team says that securing tickets often means navigating fluctuating prices, limited inventory, hidden fees, and the risk of scams.
“Buying tickets today can feel like entering a maze with a timer running,” Saxena said.
“Prices change, listings disappear, fees show up late, and fans often feel like they need to be experts just to get into the event they care about.”
How DoorTix Works
DoorTix was built from that frustration. Instead of requiring users to constantly monitor multiple ticket marketplaces, the platform tracks listings across sites and automatically purchases tickets when they meet a user’s target price.
The system is designed to respond to dynamic pricing and automated purchasing bots that can cause ticket costs to shift rapidly across platforms.
“That gives fans fair and predictable access without the guesswork,” Saxena said.
“We wanted to build something that brings the human side back into ticketing, something that feels less like fighting an algorithm and more like having someone in your corner.”
The World Cup: A Global Test Case
The World Cup tournament is a high-profile example of the problem DoorTix is designed to solve. With global demand and limited availability, the tournament reflects the same challenges seen across major live events.
“When fans are trying to attend something as massive as the World Cup, the stakes are higher. The excitement is higher. The confusion is also higher,” Saxena said.
“That is exactly where DoorTix can be useful. The World Cup gives us a real, high-pressure use case for what we are building.”
From Idea to Startup
The idea for DoorTix began with a simple observation: buying tickets often creates more stress than excitement.
As a computer science student, Saxena has helped translate that idea into a working product, balancing technical development with user experience design.
“A lot of the work is not just ‘write code and ship it.’ It’s asking what the user needs, where they’re confused, and how we can make a complex process feel simple.”
Through Georgia Tech’s CREATE-X Startup Launch program, the team has tested assumptions, gathered customer feedback, and refined its business model as it develops the product.
They’ve already seen real customer demand, and now the focus is on improving the experience and making it more scalable. Long-term, the founders envision DoorTix continuing to be a trusted ticket-buying concierge for high-demand events.
“We’re not just helping someone buy a seat. We’re helping them get to a once-in-a-lifetime memory.”
As fans around the world search for tickets to FIFA World Cup 2026 matches, a team of Georgia Tech students is working to make buying tickets to major events less stressful and more transparent.
]]>Logically this makes sense and has been backed up by past security research. However, researchers at Georgia Tech have found hidden paths in cyber-physical systems that attackers can use to disrupt or even destroy them.
To find these hidden paths before an attacker does, the researchers built a testing tool called ICSFlux. This new tool leans on the physics used by the industrial process and maps out the system to find new threats that were once thought impossible.
ICSFlux was deployed across 11 different programmable logic controllers in six industrial sectors, including chemical manufacturing, water treatment, power grids, aircraft, desalination, and waste processing. The process uncovered twenty genuine safety violations.
In one case drawn from a chemical-plant simulation, an attack path uncovered by the tool drove a reactor past its safe pressure limit and into a simulated explosion. By using nothing but valid operator commands, the team took the reactor from a completely normal and stable state to critical territory.
Because the method relies only on the physics of a process and not on the details of any one controller, the same tool worked across all six sectors without being rebuilt, and it reduced the search space by roughly 50%.
Burak Sahin, a Ph.D. student at Georgia Tech and the study's lead author, found that by sending a series of perfectly normal, fully authorized commands, intruders can slowly nudge a physical process toward a dangerous state.
“These systems are usually judged safe as long as nobody hacks into them,'' Sahin said. “What we found is that an attacker who can send everyday commands, the same ones a normal operator sends, can patiently steer the process toward a failure. No single command looks wrong, which is exactly why the usual defenses miss it.''
Most existing tools assume an attacker can rewire the controller or change the software inside it. In the real world, those controllers are locked down and cannot be touched. ICSFlux takes the opposite and more realistic view. It treats the controller as a sealed box that cannot be opened and works only with the commands an operator is normally allowed to send.
Rather than measuring how much of a controller's software it has exercised, the usual yardstick for this kind of testing, ICSFlux measures how close the physical system is getting to an unsafe limit and steers its testing in that direction.
“Two different sensor readings can run through the exact same code and still send a reactor in completely different directions,'' Sahin said. “Looking only at the software tells you nothing about whether the physical system is safe. We had to follow the physics, not the code.''
One of the study's most important takeaways emerged when the researchers tightened the safety margins to see whether caution alone would help. Even when every command stayed within approved limits, the way the controller reacted to a steady stream of small adjustments could still cause pressure to overshoot and the reactor to fail. In other words, staying inside the rules was not always enough.
All of the team's experiments were carried out on secured, controlled test beds. The work was conducted with Georgia Tech's Cyber-Physical Systems Security Lab, whose research spans the security of cyber-physical systems from industrial programmable logic controllers to marine, automotive, and drone platforms. Georgia Tech's Cyber Forensics Innovation Laboratory, a team of researchers who work together to further the investigation of advanced cyber crimes and the analysis and prevention of next-generation malware attacks, also contributed to the paper.
The labs are a collaboration between the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Fuzzing the Physical Space: Physics-Aware Testing of Black-Box Industrial Control Systems' was accepted to the 2026 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. In addition to Sahin, the team includes Ph.D. students David Oygenblik, Mingxuan Yao, and Yizhi Huang as well as Associate Professors Brendan Saltaformaggio, and Saman Zonouz.
]]>Logically this makes sense and has been backed up by past security research. However, researchers at Georgia Tech have found hidden paths in cyber-physical systems that attackers can use to disrupt or even destroy them.
To find these hidden paths before an attacker does, the researchers built a testing tool called ICSFlux. This new tool leans on the physics used by the industrial process and maps out the system to find new threats that were once thought impossible.
]]>Communications Officer II at the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy
]]>Researchers at Georgia Tech say they have developed a system to help answer that question.
Known as FIRA, the tool analyzes drone crashes to determine whether they were caused by tampered machine-learning (ML) models. The team will present its findings at the 35th USENIX Security Symposium in August.
The research addresses a growing safety challenge as drones are increasingly used for deliveries, infrastructure inspections, and agriculture.
As drones rely more on machine learning to navigate and make decisions, they also become vulnerable to model poisoning attacks. In these attacks, adversaries manipulate an AI system during its learning phase, embedding hidden triggers that can cause failures under specific conditions.
“Machine learning drones are making more decisions in flight, which makes ML a safety-critical component of these systems,” said Yizhi Huang, Ph.D. student and lead researcher on the project.
“When something goes wrong, investigators need a way to ask whether the model was responsible, but the model is the part of the system that no one can examine after a crash. FIRA gives investigators a way to investigate these cases by reconstructing what the model was doing during the crash. As more drones run with ML, this kind of forensic capability can help drones be used more effectively and safely.”
When a drone crashes, investigators must determine whether the cause was malicious interference, weather, or mechanical failure. Without reliable forensic tools, accountability is difficult to establish, and safety standards are harder to enforce.
FIRA identifies how drone components interact with machine learning models and monitors those interactions in real time, even with limited bandwidth.
The system functions like a flight recorder, capturing key system activity and reconstructing a timeline after a crash. It then analyzes the model’s behavior to determine whether a malicious trigger was introduced via poisoned ML training data.
In tests across multiple drone platforms and crash scenarios, FIRA identified failure causes and distinguished cyberattacks from environmental or mechanical issues.
The system does not require access to a drone’s source code, making it practical for real-world investigations.
“As commercial drone use expands, tools like FIRA could help improve accountability and trust in AI-powered systems operating in public airspace,” said Huang.
FIRA: Enabling Automatic Forensic Investigation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles was led by Georgia Tech’s Cyber Forensics Innovation Lab in cooperation with the Cyber-Physical Security Lab. These labs reside in the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy and the School of Electrical and Computing Engineering.
]]>Researchers at Georgia Tech say they have developed a system to help answer that question.
]]>Communications Officer II at the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy
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