Significant efforts have been investigated to develop machine learning (ML) based tools to support security operations. However, they still face key challenges in practice. A generally perceived weakness of machine learning is the lack of explanation, which motivates researchers to develop machine learning explanation techniques. However, it is not yet well understood how security practitioners perceive the benefits and pain points of machine learning and corresponding explanation methods in the context of security operations. To fill this gap and understand "what is needed", we conducted semi-structured interviews with 18 security practitioners with diverse roles, duties, and expertise. We find practitioners generally believe that ML tools should be used in conjunction with (instead of replacing) traditional rule-based methods. While ML’s output is perceived as difficult to reason, surprisingly, rule-based methods are not strictly easier to interpret. We also find that only few practitioners considered security (robustness to adversarial attacks) as a key factor for the choice of tools. Regarding ML explanations, while recognizing their values in model verification and understanding security events, practitioners also identify gaps between existing explanation methods and the needs of their downstream tasks. We collect and synthesize the suggestions from practitioners regarding explanation scheme designs, and discuss how future work can help to address these needs.

Federal funding agencies and industry entities are seeking innovative approaches to address the ever-growing cybersecurity crisis. Increasingly, numerous cybersecurity thought leaders are indicating that Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled analytics can help tackle key cybersecurity tasks and deploy defenses. This half-day workshop, co-located with ACM KDD, sought to attain significant research contributions to various aspects of AI-enabled analytics for cybersecurity applications and deployable defense solutions from academics and practitioners. This workshop was a joint workshop of the 2021 AI-enabled Cybersecurity Analytics and 2021 International Workshop on Deployable Machine Learning for Security Defense. As such, we developed an interdisciplinary Program Committee with significant experience in various aspects of AI, cybersecurity, and/or deployable defense.

The MLHat workshop aims to bring together academic researchers and industry practitioners to discuss the open challenges, potential solutions, and best practices to deploy machine learning at scale for security defense. The workshop will discuss related topics from both defender perspectives (white-hat) and the attacker perspectives (black-hat). We call the workshop MLHats, to serve as a place for people who are interested in using machine learning to solve practical security problems. The workshop will focus on defining new machine learning paradigms under various security application contexts and identifying exciting new future research directions. At the same time, the workshop will also have a strong industry presence to provide insights into the challenges in deploying and maintaining machine learning models and the much-needed discussion on the capabilities that the state-of-the-arts failed to provide.

In this paper, we propose a path planning method for nonholonomic multi-vehicle system in presence of moving obstacles. The objective is to find multiple fixed length paths for multiple vehicles with the following properties: (i) bounded curvature (ii) obstacle avoidant (iii) collision free. Our approach is based on polygonal approximation of a continuous curve. Using this idea, we formulate an arbitrarily fine relaxation of the path planning problem as a nonconvex feasibility optimization problem. Then, we propound a nonsmooth dynamical systems approach to find feasible solutions of this optimization problem. It is shown that the trajectories of the nonsmooth dynamical system always converge to some equilibria that correspond to the set of feasible solutions of the relaxed problem. The proposed framework can handle more complex mission scenarios for multi-vehicle systems such as rendezvous and area coverage.