Prof. Xiuwen Liu Keynotes CAE Symposium on Cybersecurity and AI Education
Department of Computer Science
Prof. Xiuwen Liu delivered the keynote address, “Reshaping Academic Excellence: Cybersecurity Education in the Age of Agentic AI,” at the CAE Annual Symposium on April 30. Speaking to national cybersecurity leaders and educators, the Florida State University Department of Computer Science professor argued that as autonomous AI reshapes the cyber landscape, universities must evolve curricula to teach the mathematical fundamentals of AI, rather than just how to use AI tools.
Prof. Xiuwen Liu delivering the keynote at the CAE Annual Symposium, April 30, 2026.
Keynote Highlights: AI, Cybersecurity, and Student Success
Highlighting the rapid acceleration of AI capabilities, Prof. Liu noted that an FSU-developed AI system recently outperformed human participants in a live Capture the Flag (CTF) competition by scoring 215 points. However, he emphasized that the future lies in human-AI collaboration: he celebrated an FSU undergraduate who made departmental history by solving 100% of the challenges in the Spring CTF by pairing an AI assistant with manual debugging. This dynamic mirrors Prof. Liu’s analysis of the Defense Cyber Workforce Framework, which projects AI will handle 70% of cyber tasks within five years, yet entirely replace human oversight in none.
Comparing AI security today to software security in the 1990s, Prof. Liu asserted that cyber experts must understand AI models deeper than the developers who build them. He shared his group’s latest research, published in Information Sciences, on identifying representation vulnerabilities and jailbreaking large language models via continuous embedding space optimization—such as imperceptibly altering a bank check image to trick an AI into executing malicious adversarial commands.
Closing with evidence of student resilience and excellence, Prof. Liu celebrated the FSU CyberCorps Scholarship for Service (SFS) team for capturing first place in the SFS division at the Jersey CTF after a grueling 21 hours of competition.