Conference: Support for the Workshop on Security Foundations for Societal-Scale Agentic Ecosystems

The rapidly evolving cyber-physical ecosystem is increasingly shaped by autonomous AI agents that interact with people, software systems, and other agents. This calls for new security foundations for modeling, analyzing, and containing risks in agentic ecosystems. As these agents become embedded in high-consequence digital services, security failures may propagate across organizational boundaries and create societal-scale risks. The proposed workshop will convene researchers for focused in-person exchange and provide a platform for developing a shared research vision before agentic systems become deeply integrated into critical infrastructure. Securing such ecosystems requires an interdisciplinary approach because traditional software security and the safety analysis of single-agent AI systems do not fully capture risks that emerge from multi-agent interaction. The workshop will bring together researchers from cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, and behavioral sciences to define foundational research problems in multi-agent security. Through keynote talks, lightning talks, and breakout discussions, the workshop will synthesize a community-driven research roadmap and seed future collaborations on the security foundations of societal-scale agentic ecosystems. The workshop proposal seeks support to cover venue facility costs and travel expenses for invited participants. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria. NSF Award ID: 2628525 | Program: 01002627DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT | Principal Investigator: Ning Zhang | Institution: Washington University, SAINT LOUIS, MO | Award Amount: $50,000 View on NSF Award Search: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/show-award/?AWD_ID=2628525 View on Research.gov: https://www.research.gov/awardapi-service/v1/awards/2628525.html