News

Finalist in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) AIxCC competition

Prof Huang Heqing, in collaboration with four international scholars from IBM and Texas A&M University, became a finalist in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) AIxCC competition.  His team "All you need is a fuzzing brain" was awarded USD$2 million in the AIxCC Semifinal Event held at the DEF CON 32 from 9 to 11 August 2024 in Las Vegas, USA. 

 The DEF CON is an annual networking and innovation platform for cybersecurity professionals, featuring cutting-edge talks and hands-on workshops dedicated to security, privacy and emerging technologies.  In the AIxCC Semifinal Competition, teams were tasked with developing the next-generation Cyber Reasoning Systems in the era of AI to automatically process a set of Challenge Projects to identify and rectify vulnerabilities.  The AIxCC Final Competition will be held in August 2025.

Waymo Open Dataset Challenges 2024

Our team BehaviorGPT had secured the First Place at the Sim Agents Challenge of the 2024 Waymo Open Dataset Challenges on 20 June.  The team comprised Prof Jianping Wang, Prof Nan Guan, Research Associate Xinhong Chen and two CS PhD students Zikang Zhou and Haibo Hu, in collaboration with Visiting Professor Kui Wu from University of Victoria, Prof Chun Jason Xue of Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, Dr Yung-Hui Li of Hon Hai Research Institute and PhD student Yu-Kai Huang of Carnegie Mellon University.  Meanwhile another team ModeSeq (team members: Prof Jianping Wang, Mr Zikang Zhou, Dr Yung-Hui Li and Mr Yu-Kai Huang) also achieved Second Place in the Motion Prediction Challenge.  The Prizes for First Place and Second Place are $10,000 and $5,000 in Google Cloud credits, respectively. 

Waymo, a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc, is an American autonomous driving technology company headquartered in California.  In 2019, Waymo publicly released the Waymo Open Dataset to support the AI research community in exploring various aspects of machine perception and autonomous driving technology.  In the Sim Agents Challenge, the teams were given the agent tracks for the past 1 second on a corresponding map, and optionally the associated lidar for this time interval, then they were tasked with simulating 32 realistic joint futures for all the agents in the scene.  The contributions of the teams in these Challenges have significantly aided Waymo in advancing the cutting-edge AI research. 

IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computational Intelligence (TETCI) Outstanding Paper Award 2025

Prof WU, Dapeng Oliver, in collaboration with four international scholars, has been selected to receive the IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computational Intelligence (TETCI) Outstanding Paper Award for Year 2025 for their paper titled ES Attack: Model Stealing against Deep Neural Networks without Data Hurdles. 

The Award includes a prize of US$1,000 to be shared among the co-authors.  The Award presentation will be held next year at the upcoming IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence or another major CIS Conference upon the co-authors’ choice.

Highly Ranked Scholars™ by ScholarGPS

Prof FANG Yuguang Michael, Prof WANG Jun, Prof WU Dapeng Oliver, Prof ZHANG Qingfu and Prof WANG Shiqi have been named Highly Ranked Scholars™ by ScholarGPS.  ScholarGPS, a California based company, is a leading online platform for the analysis of scholarly activity in the academia and beyond.  Highly Ranked Scholars™ are celebrated for their exceptional performance in various fields, disciplines, and specialties.