As artificial intelligence evolves from traditional machine learning to foundation models and agentic AI, society stands at a widening frontier of both opportunity and risk. This talk will examine how accelerating capabilities, emerging autonomy, and deepening societal integration have transformed AI safety and security from isolated technical issues into systemic and socio-economic priorities. It will discuss the expanding AI attack surface across data, models, and deployment pipelines, highlighting the risk of Gen AI being misused by cyber-attackers to cyber offences. This talk will also discuss defensive approaches in response to AI risks?test and evaluation, red-teaming, interpretability, monitoring etc that form the backbone of trusted AI operations. Looking ahead, it will discuss risks due to the rise of agentic AI autonomous systems capable of goal-directed behaviour and self-adaptation?and the safety and security challenges this poses.

Kwok-Yan Lam (Senior Member, IEEE) received the B.Sc. degree (first class honors) from the University of London, London, U.K., in 1987 and the Ph.D. degree from the University of Cambridge, Cambridge, U.K., in 1990. He is the Associate Vice President (Strategy and Partnerships) and Professor in the College of Computing and Data Science at the Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. He is currently also the Executive Director of the Digital Trust Centre Singapore (DTC), Executive Director of the Singapore A.I. Safety Institute, and Director of the Strategic Centre for Research in Privacy-Preserving Technologies and Systems (SCRiPTS). Since August 2020, Professor Lam has been on part-time secondment to the INTERPOL as a Consultant at Cyber and New Technology Innovation. He has been a Professor of the Tsinghua University, China (2002-2010) and a faculty member of the National University of Singapore and the University of London since 1990. His research interests include distributed systems, IoT security infrastructure, distributed authentication, biometric cryptography, homeland security, and cybersecurity. Prof. Lam received the Singapore Foundation Award in 1998 from the Japanese Chamber of Commerce and Industry in recognition of his R&D achievement in Information Security in Singapore. Professor Lam is the recipient of the 2022 Singapore Cybersecurity Hall of Fame Award.

Team Atlanta placed 1st in the DARPA AI Cyber Challenge (AIxCC), earning a $4M grand prize in the final round. In this talk, I will introduce the DARPA AIxCC competition and share our technical approaches that led to victory?specifically, how we augmented large language models (LLMs) with traditional software analysis techniques to automatically discover and repair security vulnerabilities in real-world, large-scale open-source projects.

Kim is interested in building computing systems where underlying principles justify why it should be secure. Those principles include the design of the system, analysis of its implementation, and clear separation of trusted components. Kim seeks to develop tools that automatically identify which parts of an operating system have been affected, allowing a system administrator to recover from cyberattacks without excessive, manual effort.

Since arriving at Georgia Tech, Kim has secured numerous reseach grants from the Office of Naval Research, the National Science Foundation, and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), among others. He is a recipient of various awards including NSF CAREER (2018), Internet Defense Prize (2015), and several best paper awards including USENIX Security'18 and EuroSys'17. He is the team leader of Team Atlanta who claimed victory in DARPA's AI Cyber Challenge (AIxCC, 2025).

Kim finished his doctorate in 2014 at MIT, where he worked with professors Nickolai Zeldovich and Frans Kaashoek specializing in systems security. His thesis work focused on detecting and recovering from attacks on computer systems. Kim has developed tools that would detect intrusion and discover which parts of the operating system could have been affected, allowing a systems administrator to recover from an attack without excessive manual effort. Kim received his bachelor's in both computer science and electrical engineering from KAIST in 2009, and his SM and PhD from MIT in 2011 and 2014.