Grant: Canada Research Chairs

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to gain prominence, intelligent systems have been widely developed in multiple domains. However, ensuring security and privacy is paramount when developing intelligent systems. Accompanying the power of AI are potential risks related to data leakage, tampering, and malicious assaults. Adversaries can deliberately confuse or even “poison” AI models to cause malfunctions of intelligent systems. Over the next five years, Dr. Jianbing Ni, as the Tier 2 Canada Research Chair (CRC) in Intelligent System Security and Privacy will lead multi-disciplinary research to build a secure and privacy-preserving ecosystem to protect intelligent systems throughout their data lifecycle. The immediate contributions of this CRC research program is in its design of advanced techniques, including secure and privacy-preserving data gathering, privacy-preserving and robust training, responsible AI model usage, reliable AI-generated content protection, and privacy-preserving and fair machine unlearning for protecting intelligent systems. By integrating the multidisciplinary methodologies in deep learning, cybersecurity, cryptography, social science, and software engineering, these technologies will play a vital role in addressing open research challenges and advancing the state of the art in data security, robust AI, generative AI security, and privacy-enhancing techniques. The broader contribution of Dr. Ni’s proposed research program extends to the development of innovative technologies to enhance the design theory of security and privacy, while also delivering broader value through their applications in securing emerging information and intelligent systems across various domains, such as Industry 4.0, smart healthcare, robotics, surveillance, intelligent transportation, and human identification. This CRC research program aligns with Queen’s Strategic Research Plan and Canada’s National Cyber Security Strategy. It is original and highly innovative. Students and trainees will benefit from high-quality training and mentoring opportunities in a unique multidisciplinary environment that is of international renown and that practices and promotes I-EDIAA (Indigenization - Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, Anti-Racism, and Accessibility). Through the outcomes of the proposed research and the training the chair facilitates, the impact of the proposed CRC will be long-lasting and significant locally, provincially, and nationally.