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Federal funding agencies and industry entities are seeking innovative approaches to address the ever-growing cybersecurity crisis. Increasingly, numerous cybersecurity thought leaders are indicating that Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled analytics can help tackle key cybersecurity tasks and deploy defenses. This half-day workshop, co-located with ACM KDD, sought to attain significant research contributions to various aspects of AI-enabled analytics for cybersecurity applications and deployable defense solutions from academics and practitioners. This workshop was a joint workshop of the 2021 AI-enabled Cybersecurity Analytics and 2021 International Workshop on Deployable Machine Learning for Security Defense. As such, we developed an interdisciplinary Program Committee with significant experience in various aspects of AI, cybersecurity, and/or deployable defense. 

Despite significant contributions to various aspects of cybersecurity, cyber-attacks remain on the unfortunate rise. Increasingly, internationally recognized entities such as the National Science Foundation and National Science & Technology Council have noted Artificial Intelligence can help analyze billions of log files, Dark Web data, malware, and other data sources to help execute fundamental cybersecurity tasks. Our objective for the 1st Workshop on Artificial Intelligence-enabled Cybersecurity Analytics (half-day; co-located with ACM KDD) was to gather academic and practitioners to contribute recent work pertaining to AI-enabled cybersecurity analytics. We composed an outstanding, inter-disciplinary Program Committee with significant expertise in various aspects of AI-enabled Cybersecurity Analytics to evaluate the submitted work. Significant contributions to the half-day workshop were made in the areas of CTI, vulnerability assessment, and malware analysis. 

Events such as Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal and data aggregation efforts by technology providers have illustrated how fragile modern society is to privacy violations. Internationally recognized entities such as the National Science Foundation (NSF) have indicated that Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled models, artifacts, and systems can efficiently and effectively sift through large quantities of data from legal documents, social media, Dark Web sites, and other sources to curb privacy violations. Yet considerable efforts are still required for understanding prevailing data sources, systematically developing AI-enabled privacy analytics to tackle emerging challenges, and deploying systems to address critical privacy needs. To this end, we provide an overview of prevailing data sources that can support AI-enabled privacy analytics; a multi-disciplinary research framework that connects data, algorithms, and systems to tackle emerging AI-enabled privacy analytics challenges such as entity resolution, privacy assistance systems, privacy risk modeling, and more; a summary of selected funding sources to support high-impact privacy analytics research; and an overview of prevailing conference and journal venues that can be leveraged to share and archive privacy analytics research. We conclude this paper with an introduction of the papers included in this special issue. 

Cybersecurity has rapidly emerged as a grand societal challenge of the 21st century. Innovative solutions to proactively tackle emerging cybersecurity challenges are essential to ensuring a safe and secure society. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has rapidly emerged as a viable approach for sifting through terabytes of heterogeneous cybersecurity data to execute fundamental cybersecurity tasks, such as asset prioritization, control allocation, vulnerability management, and threat detection, with unprecedented efficiency and effectiveness. Despite its initial promise, AI and cybersecurity have been traditionally siloed disciplines that relied on disparate knowledge and methodologies. Consequently, the AI for Cybersecurity discipline is in its nascency. In this article, we aim to provide an important step to progress the AI for Cybersecurity discipline. We first provide an overview of prevailing cybersecurity data, summarize extant AI for Cybersecurity application areas, and identify key limitations in the prevailing landscape. Based on these key issues, we offer a multi-disciplinary AI for Cybersecurity roadmap that centers on major themes such as cybersecurity applications and data, advanced AI methodologies for cybersecurity, and AI-enabled decision making. To help scholars and practitioners make significant headway in tackling these grand AI for Cybersecurity issues, we summarize promising funding mechanisms from the National Science Foundation (NSF) that can support long-term, systematic research programs. We conclude this article with an introduction of the articles included in this special issue.