New art exhibit in Northern Virginia explores cybersecurity

Welcome to The Torpedo Factory and the CCI cyber Arts 2024 Exhibit. The exhibits are looking at different problems that are relevant to cybersecurity. So things like how do you protect your own data? How do you deal with AI and things like image recognition and face recognition and so on. How do you protect your own privacy in that context? And you know, problems in cybersecurity, but they are looked at from artistic vision. I would consider this piece a success if somebody became curious, and they can be curious on so many different levels, you know, about the specifics of the imagery, but hopefully, they'll be curious about why is this imagery and this project being supported by the Commonwealth Cyber Security Initiative. This is a project that I've been working on for a while that uses information recovered from cell phones that I bought on eBay. Your phone might be small in size, but contains a lot more than you might think. The main driver for the project was privacy issues. Who's taking care of the data, who is selling the data, and so forth? What are my privacy rights? And do I have any? Is the technology moving so fast that companies are engaging this without any sort of guard rails? AI is powerful and interesting. It can help us to generate images, generate text, processing data, and on the other hand, it is also very dangerous. So we have to be really careful of when we using the AI in security and safety critical applications. We're bringing researchers in the arts with researchers in cybersecurity and challenging them to work together on a project, on an idea a cybersecurity as a way of bringing a different light, a different perspective, to look at cybersecurity problems. I'm very grateful that we are in a state in Virginia where the Commonwealth recognizes the importance of cybersecurity and allow us to do this kind of collaborative transdisciplinary work.