Artificial Intelligence Conference

February 20

The conference will be held on February 20, 2025 from
8:30 am to 12:30 pm.

Add this event to your calendar using the Add to Calendar link at the bottom of the page.

Virtual Event

The conference will be held using Zoom.

Prior to the event, participants must install the Zoom app on their respective devices. Participants using the web-based Zoom or calling via the phone may not be entitled to CPE credits.

GWDC Member Fee – $10

The fee for GWDC Members is $10 for the conference.
The fee for all other registrants is $30 for the conference.

To become a member and take advantage of the member rate for our events, among other benefits, join ISACA and select the Greater Washington D.C. Chapter as your local chapter.

Earn up to 4 CPEs

Attendees can earn up to 4 CPEs for this event.

Participants must respond to all the poll questions via the Zoom polling feature or chat log in order to receive NASBA CPE credits. The GWDC will not be responsible for the participant’s inability to respond to the polls.

MITRE ATLAS: Actionable Tools for AI Security & Assurance

Presenter: Dr. Christina Liaghati (MITRE)

MITRE ATLAS (atlas.mitre.org) is a public knowledge base of adversary tactics and techniques based on real-world attack observations and realistic demonstrations from artificial intelligence (AI) red teams and security groups.

This capabilities overview will include the latest MITRE ATLAS community driven and open sourced efforts focused on capturing and sharing cross community data on real world AI incidents, expanding the community’s data on vulnerabilities that can arise when using open-source AI models or data, especially for vulnerabilities that fall outside of the scope of CVE/CWE, and developing mitigations to defend against these AI security threats and vulnerabilities.

Ethics of Artifical Intelligence

Presenter: Diana Burley (American University)

AI and other emerging technologies both empower innovation and expose societal vulnerabilities. The policies that guide their deployment and use determine, to a large extent, the role that these innovations play in society. As such, the policies, and the policymakers who shape them, are powerful arbiters of future human welfare. How then, do we extend the “responsible” principles we promote with the technology developers to the policies and policymakers who shape societal standards?

AI Trends and Deploying Systems Securely at Scale

Presenter: Henrik Balle (AWS)

This presentation explores the latest generative AI trends and cloud-native approaches to deploying enterprise-ready generative AI solutions at scale, highlighting advances in and the advantages of managed services alongside comprehensive security controls. We examine how modern cloud infrastructure enables organizations to build innovative generative AI solutions while maintaining security, data privacy and regulatory compliance. Key focus areas include flexible model deployment options, knowledge bases, AI agents, integrated governance tools, and scalable architecture that helps enterprises minimize risks while maximizing AI innovation.

Unpacking Generative AI Applications: Navigating Security Risks

Presenter: Ahmed Abugharbia (SANS)

Generative AI (GenAI) is no longer a future possibility—it’s a present reality transforming industries at an unprecedented pace. As organizations embrace GenAI to drive innovation and gain competitive advantages, they must also navigate the significant risks it introduces. In this talk, we will demystify the core components of GenAI applications and examine the critical security challenges they pose.

Dr. Christina Liaghati
Trustworthy & Secure AI Department Manager and MITRE ATLAS Lead @ MITRE

Working across a collaborative global community of industry, government, and academia, Dr. Liaghati leads MITRE’s Trustworthy & Secure AI Department and MITRE ATLAS, where she passionately drives research and developments in trustworthy and secure AI for everyone working to leverage AI-enabled systems. Leading her department of 50+ scientist and engineers and serving the community with the not-for-profit, objective, MITRE perspective, she is dedicated to working together to create and openly share actionable tools, capabilities, data, and frameworks for trustworthy and secure AI like ATLAS, an ATT&CK-style framework of the threats and vulnerabilities of AI-enabled systems.

As Dr. Liaghati has worked across the community to improve the common understanding of AI security concerns, her work quickly started overlapping with broader AI assurance concerns, which includes AI equitability, interpretability, reliability, robustness, safety, and needs for privacy enhancement. As a result of this expansion beyond AI security into more of these elements of trustworthy AI and AI assurance, her current focus under ATLAS and across the international community is to build a protected mechanism for increased knowledge and incident sharing across government and industry in both AI security and the broader areas of AI assurance.

Dr. Liaghati also chairs the NATO Science and Technology Organization Research Task Group on the AI Assurance and Security, focused on fostering an enduring collaborative community of NATO organizations and industry partners, leveraging the Science and Technology Organization to shape future interoperable capability developments in AI security and assurance.

Dr. Diana Burley
Vice Provost for Research and Innovation @ American University

Dr. Diana L. Burley is a global cybersecurity expert with more than 30 years of experience driving digital transformation, implementing cybersecurity workforce initiatives, and promoting an equitable global technology community. Diana is currently Vice Provost for Research and Innovation at American University where she also leads the Khan Cyber & Economic Security Institute and serves as a member of the faculty. As both the university’s chief research officer and chief innovation officer, Diana oversees the university-wide R&D portfolio, research partnerships, and strategic initiatives to catalyze discovery. She advises government officials and regularly offers thought leadership at executive forums. Her board service includes the Cyber Future Foundation and the Global Cyber Security Advisory Group, and she has been honored by GET Cities, Executive Women’s Forum, SC Magazine, ACM, and others for her leadership in building the global cybersecurity workforce. She earned her Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University.

Henrik Balle
Principal Solutions Architect @ AWS

Henrik Balle is a Principal Solutions Architect at AWS supporting federal civilian customers, and he helps them achieve their mission through architecting and implementing innovative solutions at scale. He works closely with customers on a range of topics from AI/ML to security and governance at scale, and he holds both AWS Security and Machine Learning Specialty certifications. In his spare time, he loves road biking, motorcycling, or you might find him working on yet another home improvement project.

Ahmed Abugharbia
SANS Certified Instructor and Founder of Cyberdojo
GIAC GSEC and GPEN, AWS Certified DevOps Engineer Professional, AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate, CEH, JNCIS-FWV, JNCIA-IDP, and CCNA

Ahmed Abugharbia is a SANS Certified Instructor and founder of Cyberdojo, focusing on GenAI and Cloud Security. With over 17 years of experience in security, Ahmed has worked and led projects in cloud security, network and application security, as well as incident handling. He is the author of SEC545: GenAI and LLM Application Security™ and an instructor for SEC540: Cloud Security and DevSecOps Automation™

For over a decade Ahmed has been providing training in various capacities. Starting with mentoring new team members at work to providing training to clients on various security topics, teaching them about hacking concepts and the possible effects on their infrastructure. His first interaction with SANS was in 2013 when he took both SEC401: SANS Security Essentials and SEC560: Network Penetration Testing and Ethical Hacking, earning both the GSEC and GPEN certificates. By that point at his career, he had taken many classes, exams, and attended many seminars but felt none of which came close to how practical and comprehensive the SANS courses were. A few years later, after realizing he wanted teaching to be an integral part of his career, SANS was his first choice. He is also a faculty member of the SANS Technology Institute, an NSA Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense and multiple winner of the National Cyber League competition.

Ahmed holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science along with a myriad of professional certifications including: GIAC GSEC and GPEN, AWS Certified DevOps Engineer Professional, AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate, CEH, JNCIS-FWV, JNCIA-IDP, and CCNA. He’s fluent in both English and Arabic and when not in front of a computer screen, he is practicing Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, which he describes as a form of martial arts that is all about solving technical problems.