September TASK: Communicating Cybersecurity Ideas and AI-Driven Vulnerability Detection
Join TASK this September for a dual deep dive into communicating complex cybersecurity ideas with clarity and influence and the latest advances in AI-driven vulnerability detection and software analysis—designed for practitioners, architects, and security leaders looking to strengthen how technical ideas are understood and explore how AI is reshaping vulnerability discovery and software security.
Live and in-person at a new venue for this month + Live-Streamed on Discord
Date: Wednesday, September 30th, 2026
Time: 6:00 PM
In-Person Location: TrendAI (formerly Trend Micro Inc.) - 1 Snooker St, Toronto, ON M6K 0C3
Registration: Not required
Live-Stream: Although TASK is always best in-person, we will steam live again on Discord @ https://discord.gg/AuzHZhwPJm
Topic: Topic Why Smart People Fail to Sell Their Ideas and How to Fix It!
Speaker: Evgeniy Kharam
This session will examine a common but often overlooked challenge: strong ideas frequently fail not because they are wrong, but because they are not clearly understood, trusted, or supported. Participants will explore what gets in the way, including pressure, over-explaining, lack of structure, weak personal connection, and ineffective delivery—especially in virtual environments.
Through practical examples from cybersecurity and consulting, the presentation will show how small improvements in message structure, confidence, pauses, connection, and presence can significantly improve influence and outcomes.
Evgeniy Kharam is a cybersecurity architect, advisor, and author who helps technical teams turn complex security work into clear business outcomes. With 25+ years in cyber and technology consulting, he's known for bridging security, engineering, and leadership through practical communication, trust-building, and decision-making under pressure. He's the author of Architecting Success: The Art of Soft Skills in Technical Sales and a frequent speaker and podcast guest on leadership, modern security challenges, and soft skills. Evgeniy serves as CSO (Chief Strategy Officer) with Discern Security, helping organizations improve their cyber posture through actionable visibility, control optimization, and clear executive-level storytelling.
Topic: Recent advances in AI-driven vulnerability detection and software analysis
Speaker: David Lie
I will focus on recent work in my lab focusing on uses of AI for detecting novel vulnerabilities, as we try to understand the frontier of the nature of vulnerabilities and analyses current frontier AI is capable of. Finally, we will discuss some of the mitigations that might be necessary to make AI safer to use going forward.
David Lie is a Professor and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Secure and Reliable Systems in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto. He currently serves as the Director of the Schwartz Reisman Institute, which is focused on harnessing interdisciplinary research to advance transformative technologies like AI for societal benefit. He is also an Associate Director at the Data Sciences Institute, a Vector Faculty Affiliate, and a Senior Fellow at Massey College. Additionally, he holds appointments in the Department of Computer Science and the Faculty of Law. David is renowned for his pioneering work on the XOM architecture, an early precursor to modern trusted execution processor extensions, including Intel TDX and SGX, and AMD SEV. He was the recipient of a best paper award at SOSP for this work. He developed the PScout Android Permission mapping tool, whose datasets have been downloaded over 10,000 times and used in dozens of subsequent papers. David has served on various program committees including OSDI, Usenix Security, IEEE Security & Privacy, NDSS and CCS.
We look forward to see you all there!
The TASK Steering Committee