Securing AI: From Agentic AI to Software, Models, and the Physical World
Distinguished Research Seminar Series
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Date
20 Oct 2026
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Organiser
Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, PolyU
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Time
10:30 - 12:00
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Venue
CD302
Speaker
Prof. Yang Xiang
Remarks
If you have enquiries regarding E-certificate after the seminar, please contact david.kuo@polyu.edu.hk.
Summary
The rapid evolution of AI has shifted systems from passive models to agentic AI capable of autonomous reasoning, code generation, and interaction with real-world environments. While these advances enable powerful applications, they fundamentally challenge existing assumptions in security, software engineering, and governance. This talk synthesises recent research that reframes AI security as a cross-layer lifecycle problem, spanning learning models, LLM-enabled software, autonomous agents, and cyber-physical systems. We examine how agentic LLMs expand the attack surface, enabling dynamic extraction, evasion of vulnerability detection, and systematic ethical and compliance failures in code generation. At the model level, persistent backdoors and adversarial perception further undermine trust. As AI systems increasingly operate in IoT and safety-critical environments, this talk argues for trustworthiness by design, integrating agent-aware threat models, continuous auditing, and robust learning foundations across the AI lifecycle, and inspire the next generation of research in trustworthy and resilient AI.
Keynote Speaker
Prof. Yang Xiang
Professor
Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University, Australia
Professor Yang Xiang received his PhD in Computer Science from Deakin University, Australia. He is currently a full professor and the Director of Digital Capability Research Platform, Swinburne University of Technology, Australia. In the past 20 years, he has been working in the broad area of Cybersecurity, which covers software, system, network, and application security. He has published more than 300 research papers in many international conferences and journals in Cybersecurity, such as ACM CCS, IEEE S&P, Usenix Security, NDSS, IEEE TDSC, and IEEE TIFS. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the SpringerBriefs on Cyber Security Systems and Networks. He serves as the Associate Editor of the ACM Computing Surveys. He served as the Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, IEEE Internet of Things Journal, IEEE Transactions on Computers, and IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems. He is a current member of College of Experts (CoE) of the Australian Research Council (ARC). He is a Fellow of the IEEE.
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