Implications of AI for Cybersecurity: A Rapid Expert Consultation (2026)
Chapter: Author Biosketches
Author Biosketches
Nadya T. Bliss is the executive director of the Global Security Institute (GSI) at Arizona State University (ASU) where she leads a pan-university organization advancing research, education, and other programming at the intersection of technology and national security. Her experience lies in computer science focused on national security research and engineering, with specific expertise in cybersecurity and graph algorithms. Prior to leading GSI, Bliss was assistant vice president of research strategy at ASU and spent a decade in various positions at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, most recently as the founding group leader of the Computing and Analytics Group. Bliss holds a professor of practice appointment (and is a member of graduate faculty) in the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence and is a senior global futures scientist in the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory. She received bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science from Cornell University and earned her doctorate in Applied Mathematics for the Life and Social Sciences (Complex Adaptive Systems Science) from Arizona State University.
Actively involved in national service, Bliss serves on multiple National Academies engagements, including: the Cyber Resilience Forum and a Standing Committee on Transformative Science and Technology for the Department of Defense. In July 2024, she was appointed as a member of the National Academies' Army Research Laboratory Technical Assessment Board (ARLTAB) and as chair of its Panel on Assessment of Network, Cyber, and Computational Sciences. She is a past chair of the Computing Community Consortium as well as past chair and current steering committee member of DARPA's Information Science and Technology Study Group.
Paul England (National Academy of Engineering) is an entrepreneur and independent consultant in the areas of confidential and trusted computing, as well as hardware-based security. He recently retired from Microsoft Research, where he was a distinguished engineer and manager of a team of researchers and engineers. Paul led or contributed to many of the computer industry's hardware-based security innovations of the last 20 years. Most notable is the field of trusted and confidential computing: a combination of novel cryptographic operations together with hardware/software environments for secure computation. Trusted Computing primitives are now a feature of most mobile, client, server and cloud computer systems, and the field remains an area of active research. Paul also contributed to the design of the first trusted platform module and led the team that developed the current version. Paul became interested in cyber-resilient systems though his work with NIST in developing NIST SP 800-193 – Platform Firmware Resiliency Guidelines. Based on this, he subsequently worked with hardware partners and standards groups to develop architectures and hardware/software building blocks to enable secure and high assurance recovery of devices that have been compromised by malware or misconfiguration. Dr. England received his Ph.D. in condensed matter physics from Imperial College, London.
Giovanni Vigna is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of California in Santa Barbara (UCSB), and the director of the U.S. National Science Foundation AI Institute for Agent-based Cyber Threat Intelligence and Operation (ACTION) at UCSB. He was the chief technology officer and cofounder of Lastline, Inc., a company that provides anti-malware solutions. Lastline was acquired by VMware, Inc., in June 2020, which, in turn, was acquired by Broadcom, Inc., in November 2023. Since then, Dr. Vigna leads the Advanced Threat Prevention group in the Application Networking and Security (ANS) business unit at Broadcom. His research interests include vulnerability assessment, malware analysis, the underground economy, the security of social networks, voting security and misinformation detection, and the applications of machine learning and artificial intelligence to security problems. He has been the program chair of the International Symposium on Recent Advances in Intrusion Detection (RAID 2003), of the Internet Society (ISOC) Symposium on Network and Distributed Systems Security
(NDSS 2009), of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland 2010–2011), and of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS 2020–2021). He is known for organizing and running, since 2003, a yearly educational capture-the-flag hacking contest, called iCTF, that every year involves dozens of teams around the world. Giovanni Vigna is also the founder of the Shellphish hacking group, which has participated in more DEF CON CTF competitions than any other group in history. Giovanni Vigna received his Ph.D. from Politecnico di Milano, Italy. He is an IEEE Fellow and an ACM Fellow.
The authors declare no competing interests or disclosures.
