2027 Spring Research Colloquium
The research colloquium calls for papers and posters addressing an emerging research frontier in cybersecurity: “What happens to cybersecurity when intelligent agents, robots, networks, and humans become mutually dependent actors in the same sociotechnical systems?”
Transitional cybersecurity has largely focused on protecting computing systems, networks, devices, data, and users from unauthorized access, disruption, or malicious activity. The emergence of autonomous and agentic AI, however, calls for a broader conceptualization of cybersecurity, one that considers not only whether a system is technically secure, but also who or what is acting, how trust is established, how decisions are delegated, how malicious intent is expressed or concealed, how responsibility is distributed, and how human and machine actors respond to one another under uncertainty. The discussion shifts the focus from the traditional view of securing individual computer, systems, network, or AI models toward securing interconnected ecosystems in which humans, AI agents, robots, sensors, networks, and organizations continuously interact, adapt, and make decisions on one another’s behalf. In such ecosystems, cybersecurity is no longer simply a matter of protecting technical assets. It becomes a question of how security, trust, agency, accountability, and resilience are negotiated across human and machine actors.
This colloquium brings together researchers across disciplines to explore this emerging frontier. We do not view cybersecurity as solely a technical problem. Rather, the colloquium examines cybersecurity as a dynamic sociotechnical phenomenon in which technological capabilities, human behavior, organizational structures, economic incentives, criminal activity, and societal institutions continuously shape, and are shaped by, one another.
The colloquium builds upon the complementary expertise in secure networking and distributed systems, AI and computer vision, cyber-physical and industrial systems, human-AI interaction, behavioral cybersecurity, deception and misinformation, cybercrime, organizational and information systems, and the governance of emerging technologies. These perspectives create opportunities to move beyond isolated technical defenses toward a more comprehensive science of secure human-AI-robot ecosystems. We invite researchers, faculty, and students to submit research articles, case studies, position papers, research-in-progress, methodology papers, and panel discussion proposals addressing emerging challenges and opportunities in cybersecurity ecosystems, including, but not limited to:
- Cybersecurity ecosystems
- The emerging problem of machine agency and delegated action
- Trust, deception, and adversarial human-AI interaction
- Autonomous cyber defense and the adversarial AI ecosystem
- Robotics, cyber-physical systems, and the physical consequences of cyberattacks
- Organizations, markets, and the sociotechnical systems of autonomous cybersecurity
The central premise of the colloquium is that the next era of cybersecurity cannot be adequately understood from a single disciplinary perspective. The colloquium brings together diverse perspectives to create a new research space in which cybersecurity is understood simultaneously as a technical, behavioral, organizational, economic, criminal, and societal phenomenon. By fostering dialogue across disciplines, the colloquium seeks to identify emerging research questions, develop new theoretical perspectives, and encourage innovative approaches to securing increasingly interconnected human-AI-robot ecosystems.