Beneath the surface of the second-floor lab in UC Santa Barbara’s Harold Frank Hall, a pod of sharp minds is moving toward a $4 million prize and the expansion of artificial intelligence (AI). Shellphish, UCSB’s elite hacking team, has plunged deep into a two-year competition, the Artificial Intelligence Cyber Challenge (AIxCC) sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
Shellphish is one of seven teams competing this August. Each team will develop a program, which will be tested for its ability to detect and fix, without human intervention, code vulnerabilities in open-source software. These complex programs fuel everything from health care and financial networks to aerospace and public utilities.
Though their name suggests something small and edible, this crew's net is wide, with 20 to 25 team members spanning across three universities: UCSB, Arizona State University, and Purdue. And, it turns out, the professors advising the teams in Arizona and Indiana are former UCSB students.