Joint CCI SWVA and VT Applied Algebra Seminar
November 4, 2026
Event details :
Date: Wednesday, November 4, 2026
Time: 2:00 - 3:00 p.m.
Location: 118 Steger Hall, 1015 Life Science Circle, Blacksburg, VA 24061
About this event :
CCI SWVA and the VT Applied Algebra Seminar are pleased to host Dr. Peng Gao (Computer Science, Virginia Tech), who will give a presentation entitled:
Rethinking Cyber Defense in the Age of Agentic AI
This seminar will be in-person only.
Abtract: Frontier AI is reshaping cybersecurity, offering unprecedented opportunities for autonomous defense while introducing new security risks. This talk presents our recent research and insights into building intelligent and trustworthy cyber defense, centered on a vision of transforming security evidence into autonomous action through agentic AI grounded in trust. I will show how system provenance provides rich evidence to uncover sophisticated multi-stage attacks hidden in benign activity; how threat intelligence and AI agents enable knowledge-augmented reasoning and automation across security domains, including SOC alert triage and network traffic analysis; and how network infrastructures can be rearchitected as a programmable defense backbone for line-rate security enforcement. Crucially, because autonomous defense is only as dependable as the AI powering it, I will discuss how to secure AI agents themselves, from a system defense perspective. Together, these efforts shed light on how frontier agents and security domain knowledge can jointly shape the future of cyber defense.
About the Speaker: Dr. Peng Gao is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Virginia Tech and a Faculty Fellow of the Commonwealth Cyber Initiative (CCI). He is a Senior Member of both IEEE and ACM. Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University and his B.E. from Shanghai Jiao Tong University. His research lies at the intersection of security and privacy, systems and networking, and AI, with a recent focus on intelligent cyber defense, secure agentic AI, and trustworthy computing systems. His work has frequently appeared in leading venues including IEEE S&P, USENIX Security, CCS, NDSS, EuroS&P, USENIX ATC, VLDB, ICDE, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, KDD, and ICSE, resulting in multiple patents and wide industry adoption. He regularly serves on the program committees of major security and systems conferences and is currently an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC). His honors include the NSF CAREER Award (2025), CSAW Applied Research Finalist (2018), Microsoft Security AI Research Award (2020), Amazon Research Award (2021, 2026), Cisco Research Award (2021), Meta Research Award Finalist (2021), Amazon–VT Initiative Faculty Research Award (2022), and Google Academic Research Award (2025).