Artificial Intelligence & Cybersecurity

The Course is offered in an inter-university international collaboration with the Alpen-Adria University of Klagenfurt (UniAAK-Austria), where some courses will be held. It allows students to obtain a double degree. The classes are offered in English and possibly on-line in both the institutions.
As far as Artificial Intelligence is concerned, the main focus is on the study of languages and techniques for Knowledge Representation and Reasoning and their application for the formalization and solution of problems in constrained spaces. The relationships between computational complexity and language expressivity will be investigated. Students will acquire theoretical foundations and advanced techniques and languages for Machine Learning and Deep Learning. Several application scenarios will be presented, with particular emphasis toward Cybersecurity. Aspects of Ethics in AI will be studied.
As far as Cybersecurity is concerned, students will learn the theoretical foundations of public and private cryptography, as well as formal methods and languages for (semi) automatic verification of communication protocols. Several techniques related to cyber attacks will be investigated, such as methods for alerting and preventing attacks, in particular those based on machine learning techniques.
Aspects related to privacy and data management will be presented.
The course is organized as follows. In the first year students attend (on campus) the mandatory courses offered by the university of Udine and one mandatory course offered (on-line) by UniAAK. Students choose other optional exams (e.g., in the areas of distributed systems, advanced databases, computer network security, quantum computing, formal methods, advanced algorithms, recommended systems, information retrieval, virtual and augmented reality). In the first semester of the second year students move to UniAAK in order to attend (on campus) some advanced courses in the area of Artificial Intelligence and of Cybersecurity. At the end of the program the students spend a period of internship (in a factory or in one of the two universities) and prepare a thesis supervised by professors of both the universities.