AWS Tech Talk: Organizational Partnerships for Evolving AI/ML Security & Privacy

Join AWS Industries Tech Lead for AI/ML and Generative AI Security & Privacy Emily Soward and AWS Support Engineering Security Principal program manager Collin Pace to learn about strategies organizations can use to evolve organizational security and privacy posture and operational readiness for innovative AI/ML workloads.

AWS Customers want to move quickly and maintain a high standard of security and privacy for innovation, but often find themselves stymied when extending existing governance and controls design to AI/ML workload research and development. This talk provides guided steps for aligning incentives and priorities between AI/ML and Security teams to facilitate identifying threats and opportunities, identifying and evaluating tradeoffs, implementing baseline controls, defining organizational governance for intelligent systems, and more. Attendees will take away steps for driving incremental improvement and readiness in their teams and organizations. This talk will be accessible to those with a security-minded curiosity, and does not assume expertise or experience in AI/ML security.

We will have a presentation followed by an interactive Q&A with our speakers.

Emily Soward
Emily Soward wears multiple hats in AWS Industries, where she drives and delivers technical leadership in developing capacity and capabilities for security, privacy, and operational readiness of AI/ML and Generative AI workloads. She is skilled in identifying governed usage of AI/ML, controls design and ownership enforcement through architecture and process, security & privacy partnerships, threat vector characterization and threat management research, process automation and optimization with AI/ML, and identifying opportunities for governance and security modernization and corresponding solutions. Recently, Emily has been driving strategy and organizational mechanism development focused on security and privacy of Generative AI, Large Language Models (LLMs), and Foundation Models (FMs).

By day, Emily guides AWS Customers and internal AWS teams and businesses via both hands on delivery and thought leadership in defining and executing on organizational and workload-level strategies for de-risking innovation for customers new to developing AI/ML workloads, and in refactoring legacy AI/ML implementations. Emily is an AWS Senior Speaker, an active AWS AppSec/ProdSec aligned Security Guardian, an active author and reviewer for application security and privacy guidance, a calibrated tech sales enablement SME, and an author of the AWS Well-Architected Machine Learning Lens. Emily serves as a core community organizer and steering committee member for Portland AWS User Group. Emily has served in applied scientific, engineering, and technology leadership roles focused on AI-enabled product research and development, operational excellence, and governance for AI workloads in the public and private sector.

By nights and weekends, Emily volunteers with Girl Scouts at the Service Unit and Troop level, serves as Board Vice President for The Ecological Archive, a 501c3 for innovation in sustainability, makes it home for dinner most nights with her family, and stuffs in as much time in crafting and the fiber arts as possible.

Collin Pace
Collin Pace operates on multiple levels for AWS Customers as a Principal Technical Program Manager, where he drives global Security program execution in AWS Support Engineering and champions security excellence for Application and Production Security. He is skilled in assurance, organizational security strategy, incident and communications management, capabilities evaluation and development, partnership development, threat modeling, threat response, threat management, and continuous improvement.

By day, Collin develops capacity and capabilities in security via mechanisms such as leading training, development, and curriculum for AWS AppSec/ProdSec Guardians at AWS in the Support Engineering organization, scaling successful security practices and security mindset throughout the global business. Collin is a leading voice and sought-after advisor and thought leader in the development of organizational security partnerships within AWS Support and beyond, driving growth and impact from IC builders to the senior executive level. Collin has experience leading and stewarding security teams and programs in the U.S. Public Sector across multiple Defense and Homeland Security agencies as well as for critical infrastructure projects.

By nights and weekends, Collin serves as an instructor in hand-to-hand tactical training and readiness, volunteers in his community, participates in local business leadership events, and enjoys traveling with his family.

All attendees must check in with AWS Reception at the event and register interest on Meetup 2 days prior if possible.
Check in and AWS User Group Community Networking begins at 2:30pm, AWS Tech Talk begins at 3:30, and the event ends at 5pm.