📖 Course Overview
The course is designed to provide an introductory yet technical understanding of the security vulnerabilities and threats that modern AI systems face, with a focus on deep neural networks and computer vision applications. Participants will explore key definitions and techniques for designing and implementing AI-based security attacks and safety threats while also gaining a foundational understanding of how to protect AI systems against them. A portion of the course will be devoted to hands-on laboratory sessions, where participants will implement attacks and countermeasures in practical deep neural network applications.
The main topics of the course are organized as follows:
- AI Foundations, Threat Modeling, and preliminaries
- Adversarial Attacks, Defenses, and Robust Training
- Poisoning Attacks, Backdoors, and Dataset Analysis
- Privacy Attacks and Distributed Learning
- Explainable, Fairness, and Ethical AI
- Security and Safety of large models and Agentic Systems
🛠️ Format & Exam
- Lectures: 30 hours (in-person, TECIP Institute, CNR Area, Pisa).
- Exam (3 CFU): Project/Research work + oral discussion.
To attend the course in the first semester of the 2026–2027 academic year, please fill out the following form: Course Registration Form.
Partecipants will be added to a Microsoft Teams channel for feedback, questions, announcements and online lectures.
🗓️ Schedule
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Lecture 1 – AI Foundations & Threat Modeling –
3 November (14:00–17:00)5 November (14:00–17:00) , PC Room, Tecip, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Via Giuseppe Moruzzi 1 -
Lecture 2 – Adversarial Attacks – 10 November (14:00–17:00) , PC Room, Tecip, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Via Giuseppe Moruzzi 1
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Lecture 3 – Defenses & Robust Training – 12 November (14:00–17:00) , PC Room, Tecip, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Via Giuseppe Moruzzi 1
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Lecture 4 – OOD Generalization & Detection – 24 November (14:00–17:00) , PC Room, Tecip, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Via Giuseppe Moruzzi 1
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Lecture 5 – Poisoning, Backdoors & Dataset Analysis – 26 November (14:00–17:00) , PC Room, Tecip, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Via Giuseppe Moruzzi 1
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Lecture 6 – Privacy Attacks & Distributed Learning Security – 1 December (14:00–17:00) , PC Room, Tecip, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Via Giuseppe Moruzzi 1
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Lecture 7 – Explainable, Fairness & Ethical AI – 3 December (14:30–17:30) , PC Room, Tecip, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Via Giuseppe Moruzzi 1
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Lecture 8 – LLM & VLM Foundations – 10 December (14:00–17:00) , PC Room, Tecip, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Via Giuseppe Moruzzi 1
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Lecture 9 – Safety, Steering & Jailbreak – 15 December (14:00–17:00) , PC Room, Tecip, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Via Giuseppe Moruzzi 1
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Lecture 10 – Security of Agentic Systems – 16 December (14:00–17:00) , PC Room, Tecip, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Via Giuseppe Moruzzi 1
📂 Lectures
You can find all lectures and notebooks in the following OneDrive folder: LINK
📬 Contact
giulio.rossolini@santannapisa.it
stefano.leggio@santannapisa.it
alberto.dorizza@santannapisa.it