Our latest Women in Cyber event. More than: a Profile
12 November 2019
Within cyber security, we are constantly looking across industries to find novel ways to solve important problems. This is why, in our recent inaugural Women in Cyber event of the ‘More than’ series, we welcomed clients and colleagues from across industries at our Frontier space to explore the value of all forms of diversity within cyber security. This year’s event, attended by both CISOs and graduate new joiners, focused on the use of language and linguistics in technology, with keynote presentations from specialists in threat intelligence and artificial intelligence.
Matt Wixey leads the technical research team at PwC, and for his undergraduate degree Matt studied English Language and Literature. In his presentation - From serial killers to catfish: How words can help in the hunt for criminals - he applied forensic linguistics techniques to the art of threat intelligence. He first discussed cases where forensic linguistics were employed to solve crimes, and then showed us how the same techniques can be applied to identifying sockpuppets, investigating phishing emails and forum posts, and even analysing Twitter to determine when an individual is lying or whether they are not the tweet’s true author.
He finished his talk by showing us various free tools that can be used to put the methods he discussed into practice. Finally, he fooled us all with a deceptive riddle, which we’ve included at the end of this post.
Dr. Natalia Criado, in her presentation - Trusted AI: free from (human) bias, unfairness and discrimination - started off by introducing the UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in Safe and Trusted AI, a collaboration between King’s College London and Imperial College London with the aim of making the UK a leader in AI research by training a new generation of researchers in this field.
She also spoke about the proliferation of algorithms in our day to day lives, and why that makes it so crucial to secure them, and to ensure they are not systematically discriminating against specific groups of people on a large scale.
Each talk was followed by a Q&A from the audience that reflected upon the points raised during the presentations, including some (poor) attempts at solving Matt’s Wixey’s riddle! The discussion continued at the networking session, where attendees were able to mingle and share their thoughts and experiences.
Email us at [email protected] if you would like to attend any future events or think you’ve cracked one of Matt’s famous riddles (or need a clue!).
I’m a word with five letters, that’s your first clue.
I’m honest and fair, there’s no doubt.
I’m of no use to trains if scrambled, it’s true.
Change me again, I’m somewhere warm and cosy throughout.
