Our Purpose
The rapid advancements in digital technology has created new opportunities for addressing societal challenges and opportunities in digital innovation. Ensuring cybersecurity and promoting the responsible and legal use of artificial intelligence (AI) will be critical to creating safety in cyberspace while building sustainable and beneficial platforms for digital transformation across business and societal sectors.
The Opportunity
We aim to support collaborative research that addresses social and business challenges in digital technology by advancing research and innovation in cybersecurity, fairness and inclusiveness, AI, policy and law. We also seek to address problems such as the spread of misinformation and polarization in social media, and keeping networked information systems secure from cyberattacks.
The following are just a few examples of how UC Noyce Initiative research collaborations are making an impact in cybersecurity:
Fair, Responsible & Equitable Use of AI
Professor Bill Maurer and the AI Policy Lab, a collaboration between the School of Law and School of Social Science at UC Irvine, aims to educate policymakers and the general public about risks and benefits of AI through the production of policy briefs. The overall goal is to promote the fair, responsible and equitable use of AI.
Click here to learn more about the Irvine Initiative in AI, Law and Society.
Evaluating Data Privacy Laws
UC Davis Associate Professor Zubair Shafiq and UC Irvine Professor Athina Markopoulou aim to develop novel auditing tools, using a combination of technological and policy approaches, to evaluate compliance to new and existing data privacy laws by consumers and regulators. Their work has already gained national media attention and been cited in a Federal Trade Commission lawsuit against Amazon.
Click here to learn more about this UC Noyce Initiative collaborative project.
De-Biasing Social Media
Associate Professor Zubair Shafiq, Professors Ian Davidson, Xin Liu and Magdalena Wojcieszak, plus graduate students are working to understand how the algorithms used by social media platforms to offer users recommendations for viewing might be reinforcing biases, and then to test a “de-biasing” intervention.
Click here to learn more about this UC Noyce Initiative collaborative research project.
Keeping Online Data Safe
Professor Dawn Song aims to develop distributed privacy-preserving cybersecurity learning systems. This research will boost the development of collaborative cyber threat intelligence, cross-silo fraud detection, and resilient malware and spam detection.
Click here to learn more about Professor Song's UC Noyce Initiative Project.
Improving Human-AI Interactions
Professor Miguel Eckstein, Professor Mark Steyvers and Professor William Wang are leveraging an interdisciplinary research approach, aimed to address the challenges of human-AI interaction to make them more effective using empirical and theoretical approaches.
Click here to learn more about one of the PIs of this UC Noyce Initiative project.