IFCYBER 2022: Cyber Security for Society Conference

IFCYBER: Cyber Security for Society Conference

The UNSW Institute for Cyber Security (IFCYBER) inaugural conference, Cyber Security for Society, will be held at the UNSW Kensington, Sydney campus on 8 April 2022. This multidisciplinary conference will discuss and debate cyber issues relating to engineering & computer science, the arts, social sciences, psychology, business, law, and science. We have invited speakers leading in the field of cyber security across government, industry, and academia.

Masterclasses on Media, Graph Neural Networks: Fundamentals and Applications, Law and Social Network Analysis and student Cyber Thesis Competition (CTC) showcasing student thesis' 

Our Media masterclass will be held by Mr Nigel Phair the Director of Enterprise for the institute. He is an influential analyst on the intersection of technology, crime and society. He has published three acclaimed books on the international impact of cybercrime, is a regular media commentator and provides executive and board advice on strategy, risk & governance of technology. In this class you will learn what the drivers are by the media when seeking expert (and sometime non-expert) commentary; how to engage with media producers and presenters; and how to have fun along the way.  

The Law masterclass is being run by Professor Lyria Bennett Moses, Director of the UNSW Allens Hub for Technology, Law and Innovation and Associate Dean (Research) and Professor in the Faculty of Law and Justice at UNSW Sydney. She is also co-lead of the Law and Policy theme in the Cyber Security Cooperative Research Centre. Her research explores issues around the relationship between technology and law, including the types of legal issues that arise as technology changes, how these issues are addressed in Australia and other jurisdictions, and the problems of treating “technology” as an object of regulation. In this class you will learn the ways in which law regulates for better cyber security, through disincentivising attack, incentivising defence, and increasing expertise. It will provide a broad map of law and its explain the importance of understanding the role law plays in cyber security.  

Social Networking Analysis has Assoc Prof Rob Nicholls leading this masterclass. Rob is an associate professor in regulation and governance at the UNSW Business School and a visiting professional fellow at UTS Sydney Law. His research interests focus on competition policy, the regulation of networked industries and the financial services sector with an emphasis on the effects of technology in the regulatory space. His career has spanned over thirty-years, concentrating on competition, regulation and governance. In this class you will learn how social network analysis can be applied to a real world network using the software package called Gephi. The class will graphically demonstrate how to investigate interacting structures using graph theory.  

Graph Neural Networks: Fundamentals and Applications will be presented by  Dr Yang Song and Dr Jiaojiao Jiang.  Deep neural networks have been predominant in AI applications during the past decade. While convolutional neural networks are highly effective in learning image representations, there are many applications in which data are inherently graphs, such as molecule graphs, social networks, citation networks and recommender systems. To encode the graphical structures into machine learning systems, graph neural networks (GNNs) have thus become increasingly popular and many advanced GNN models have been designed recently for various application domains. Compared to other deep learning approaches, GNN-based development is relatively new and there are many potential advantages that remain to be explored, including learning of higher degree relationships and modelling of dynamic data. In this master class, we will present a broad overview of the underlying principles of GNNs and some well-known GNN models. We will also present some case studies of GNNs in various application domains, particularly for social networks and cybersecurity. 

The student Cyber Thesis Competition (CTC) will be chaired by Nadeem Ahmed a Senior Research Fellow at the Cyber Security Cooperative Research Centre (CSCRC). The CTC will be held after the masterclasses in the Leighton Hall. This is an opportunity to learn about the research our students are pursuing. If you would like to participate, please follow the link below. All the submissions should be uploaded to a file-sharing site (e.g., Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive), and the link to access the file should be sent to the email address ifcyber.ctc@unsw.edu.au

Date and time: Thu., 7 April 2022   -   2:00pm - 5:00 pm AEST

Location: John Niland Scientia Building, Library Walk,  Kensington, NSW 2033