Dear colleagues,

apologies for multiple postings. We are nearing the submission deadline is: February 28, 2021.

As a remaing, please find below the call for paper for the Special Issue of the Annals of Telecommunications, entitled "Interactions between artificial intelligence and cybersecurity to protect future networks"

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Artificial intelligence is the most dynamic research domain of this last decade, and as such has been increasingly penetrating other research domains, and all sectors of society. There is not a single application that AI researchers have not thought of improving with machine intelligence, from disease prognosis to crop management, to autonomous vehicles and facial recognition. Given the wealth of information produced in the era by next-generation networks (incl. virtualized networks, 5G, IoT), AI is expected to discover patterns and make predictions that no human can make, enhancing the efficiency of such networks on one hand, while offering new services on the other hand. In fact, it enables automation through the advance of AI-based decision-making. As such, reasoning is even more important than data analytics in assessing situations. Next-generation networks are thus critical assets that need to be protected as the society will be gradually relying on it, connecting every sector, from the home or workplace to the transport system or the hospital.

Cybersecurity may as well benefit from AI approaches for diverse tasks such as malware analysis, intrusion detection, log analysis, threat classification, with a goal to enhance the cybersecurity situation of next-generation networks. Amalgamations between AI and Cybersecurity have been ongoing for more than three decades, and both of them are recently experiencing a blooming stage due to the increasing deployment of next- generation networks in the society. On the one hand, AI offers tremendous capabilities to analyze the threats, risks and attacks in various networking systems, enabling comprehensive and in-depth defense strategies. For example, both supervised and unsupervised machine learning algorithms have been frequently used to detect intrusion, while reinforcement learning has the potential to discover optimal security countermeasures for a particular attack. There is also an emerging trend on utilizing AI to assess and improve cybersecurity measures, e.g., by generating evaluation datasets, which Cybersecurity is direly lacking, or predict new malware. On the other hand, AI platforms, algorithms, and systems are attracting significant attention from the Cybersecurity community because of their increasing development, deployment, and application in our ICT infrastructure and services. For instance, the lack of interpretability of many deep learning models makes it extremely hard to defend against a sophisticated attack that either poisons data inputs and transformation, or exploits algorithm parameters and underlying software bugs. Recently, adversarial machine learning approaches have also prompted considerations for more critical thinking with respect to the adoption of AI-based systems, as next-generation network infrastructures that depend on them could be crippled by AI-related incidents then.

This special issue is focused at the intersection between AI and Cybersecurity for the benefit of next-generation networks, with an objective to bringing together the engineers, researchers, and practitioners from both AI and Cybersecurity communities in industry and academy, as well as stakeholders in next-generation networks, to explore together the emerging issues, topics, and solutions in the subjects listed above.

== Topics == Topics of interest for this special issue include but are not limited to:

AI for the Cybersecurity of next-generation networks Anomaly detection Malware detection Botnet detection Root cause analysis Security information and event management DPI and network forensics, including encrypted traffic analysis Countermeasure selection Moving Target Defense Intelligent honeypots Dataset generation Attack generation Adversarial examples and Robustness Critical analysis of AI/ML applied to Cybersecurity Security of AI-based next-generation networks Security and privacy in AI algorithms Security in intelligent systems Trust in AI platforms Security and privacy of BigData processing Formal verification of AI algorithms Evasion/Deception of AI algorithms Adversarial examples and Robustness

== Important Dates == Manuscript Submission: Extended to February 28, 2021 Online with DOI: As soon as accepted Printed Issue: Second half of 2021

== Editors == Lead Guest Editor Gregory Blanc, Institut Mines-Télécom/Télécom SudParis, Institut Polytechnique de Paris, France

Guest Editors Yang Liu, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore Rongxing Lu, University of New Brunswick, Canada Takeshi Takahashi, Cybersecurity Laboratory, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Koganei, Japan Zonghua Zhang, Huawei France Research Center, Paris, France

== Submission Guidelines == Papers must describe original research that advances state-of-the-art research and must not be simultaneously submitted to a journal or a conference with proceedings. Papers must be written in excellent English and should not exceed 20 pages. Previously published or accepted conference papers must contain at least 50% new material to be considered for the special issue. A covering letter to the Guest editors clearly describing the extensions made must accompany these types of submissions. All submissions must be made using the instructions available at: http://annalsoftelecommunications.wp.mines-telecom.fr/how-to-publish/ The authors can directly submit their papers at: https://www.editorialmanager.com/ante/ and must select “Open Topic” in the menu “Choose Article Type” and then in the questionnaire on the “Additional Information” section, they will be able to select the item “CfP: Interactions between artificial intelligence and cybersecurity to protect future networks”. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Best regards,

Gregory Blanc