Leadership Team


Austin Carson

Position: Board Member
Affiliation: SeedAi
Bio:

Austin co-founded the Congressional Tech Staff Association, co-led the Congressional Cybersecurity Caucus and the Congressional High Tech Caucus, and is a founding fellow of the Internet Law and Policy Foundry. Currently Austin is the President and Founder of SeedAI, a nonprofit established to work with a diverse group of policymakers, academics, and private sector experts to help communities across the United States access the resources they need to engage with AI.


Gavin Klondike

Position: Workshops Lead
Bio:

Gavin Klondike (GTKlondike) is a senior security consultant and researcher specializing in network security and penetration testing. He is the founder of NetSec Explained, a blog and YouTube channel, where he shares intermediate to advanced level network security topics in an easy-to-understand way. As a consultant, he has honed his skills both offensively and defensively, giving him a unique perspective on how to best secure an organization’s most critical assets. Gavin is dedicated to sharing his knowledge with the next generation of cybersecurity professionals to help them level up their skills. His current research focus is in finding ways to address the cybersecurity skills gap, by utilizing AI/ML to augment the capabilities of current security resources.


Jason Haddix

Position: Board Member
Affiliation: BuddoBot
Bio:

Jason Haddix AKA jhaddix is the CISO and “Hacker in Charge” at BuddoBot, a world-class adversary emulation and red teaming​ consultancy. He’s had a distinguished 18-year career in cybersecurity previously serving as the CISO of Ubisoft, Head of Trust/Security/Operations at Bugcrowd, Director of Penetration Testing at HP, and Lead Penetration Tester at Redspin. He has also held positions doing mobile penetration testing, network/infrastructure security assessments, and static analysis. Jason is a hacker, bug hunter and currently ranked 51st all-time on Bugcrowd’s bug bounty leaderboards. Currently, he specializes in recon, web application analysis, and emerging technologies. Jason has also authored many talks on offensive security methodology, including speaking at cons such as DEFCON, Besides, BlackHat, RSA, OWASP, Nullcon, SANS, IANS, BruCon, Toorcon and many more.


Rich Harang

Position: CFP Lead, Steering Committee Member
Affiliation: NVIDIA
Expertise: Network Intrusion Detection, ML for Offense
Bio:

Rich Harang is a Principal Security Architect at NVIDIA, specializing in ML/AI systems, with over a decade of experience at the intersection of computer security, machine learning, and privacy. He received his PhD in Statistics from the University of California Santa Barbara in 2010. Prior to joining NVIDIA, he led the Algorithms Research team at Duo, led research on using machine learning models to detect malicious software, scripts, and web content at Sophos AI, and worked as a Team Lead at the US Army Research Laboratory. His research interests include adversarial machine learning, addressing bias and uncertainty in machine learning, and ways to use machine learning to support human analysis. Richard’s work has been presented at USENIX, BlackHat, IEEE S&P workshops, and DEF CON AI Village, among others, and has also been featured in The Register and KrebsOnSecurity.


Sven Cattell

Position: President, Steering Committee Member
Affiliation: nbhd.ai
Expertise: ML Defense, Geometric data analysis
Bio:

Sven founded the AI Village in 2018 and has been running it ever since. He was the principal organizer of AIV’s Generative Red Team at DEFCON 31. Sven is also the founder of nbhd.ai, a startup focused on the security and integrity of datasets and the AI they build. He was previously a senior data scientist at Elastic where he built the malware model training pipeline. He has a PhD in Algebraic Topology, and a postdoc in geometric machine learning where he focused on anomaly and novelty detection.


Will Pearce

Position: CTF Lead, Steering Committee Member
Affiliation: NVIDIA
Expertise: ML Threat Detection
Bio:

Will Pearce is one of the founders of dreadnode.io a startup that is building AI cyber ranges. He focuses on attacking machine learning systems and developing ML-enabled red team capabilities. Previously, he was Senior Security Researcher on the AI Red Team at NVIDIA and the Red Team Lead for the Azure Trustworthy ML team at Microsoft, and a Senior Security Consultant at Silent Break Security. His work on offensive machine learning has appeared at industry conferences including Blackhat, Defcon AI Village, WWHF, DerbyCon, LabsCon, and academic appearances at the SAI Conference on Computing and IEEE.