December 18, 2025

Dawn Song - Episode 79

30 minutes

In this episode of ACM ByteCast, our special guest host Scott Hanselman (of The Hanselminutes Podcast) welcomes ACM Fellow Dawn Song, Professor in Computer Science at UC Berkeley, Co-Director of Berkeley Center for Responsible Decentralized Intelligence (RDI), and Founder of Oasis Labs. Her research interest lies in AI safety and security, Agentic AI, deep learning, security and privacy, and decentralization technology. Dawn is the recipient of numerous awards including the MacArthur Fellowship, the Guggenheim Fellowship, the NSF CAREER Award, the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the MIT Technology Review TR-35 Award, ACM SIGSAC Outstanding Innovation Award, and more than 10 Test-of-Time awards and Best Paper awards from top conferences in Computer Security and Deep Learning. She has been recognized as Most Influential Scholar (AMiner Award) for being the most cited scholar in computer security. Dawn is an IEEE Fellow and an Elected Member of American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is also a serial entrepreneur and has been named on the Female Founder 100 List by Inc. and Wired25 List of Innovators.

Dawn shares her academic journey in cybersecurity, which used to be a much smaller field and how the MacArthur Fellowship (aka the “Genius Grant”) and other prestigious recognitions enabled her to pursue impactful multidisciplinary research. Dawn and Scott cover a myriad of topics around Agentic AI, including current and future security vulnerabilities from AI-powered malicious attacks, Dawn’s popular MOOC at RDI, and the associated AgentX-AgentBeats global competition (with more than $1 million in prizes and resources) focused on standardized, reproducible agent evaluation benchmarks to advance the field as a public good.

AgentX-AgentBeats Agentic AI Competition

Berkeley RDI Agentic AI MOOC

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