Abstract: 

Applied Natural Language Processing for cybersecurity: Taming the bleeding edge language models for practical security use cases

We have new and powerful natural language models cropping up almost every month, each with more than a billion parameters, capable of numerous open-ended human-like language tasks – like conjuring up crazy concoctions of realistic images from unrealistic human descriptions. But how can they be useful for practical purposes in the cybersecurity domain? Have we solved all the low hanging fruits related to existing security bottlenecks and automation of all kinds of security events analysis?

Following questions will be proposed to the panel for discussion:

1. Large Language Models – A new Moore’s Law? Can multibillion parameter models be finally used for practical infosec use cases?

2. Have we explored tried and tested NLP techniques being successfully used in other domains – for e.g. Topic Modeling in advertisement and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) industry – are these being successfully adapted for infosec use cases? What are other examples?

3. Infosec benchmark datasets for language modeling – is enough work being done here? How can we move the needle here?

4. Dangers and pitfalls of open-ended language models in infosec

Bio: 

George Williams is the Head of AI at Smile Identity, an identity management and computer vision-based biometrics provider. He has held senior leadership roles in software engineering, system design, data science, and AI research, including tenures at Apple's New Product Architecture group and at New York University's Courant Institute. He can talk on a broad range of topics at the intersection of e-commerce, machine learning, cybersecurity, computer hardware, and computer science. He is an author of several research papers in computer vision and deep learning, published at NeurIPS, CVPR, ICASSP, ICCV, and SIGGRAPH. George is regularly invited to present at meetups and technology conferences, including recent talks at Blackhat, Open Data Science Conference, Apache Spark Summit, JupyterCon, AnacondaCon, and Space Computing. He is a track chair at the Valleyml.ai conference and as a workshop chair for the Neural Information Processing Conference.