Nathalie Baracaldo, IBM Research - Almaden
The word "policy" means radically different things across the security, engineering, and AI research communities; examples include access controls, agent flow constraints, output validation, behavioral norms, and model alignment. This fragmentation has produced enforcement approaches that are siloed, ad hoc, and designed to handle only one policy at a time, while real enterprise GenAI applications demand simultaneous compliance across all these layers at once. Compounding this problem, some policies have no deterministic enforcement path and require inspecting model internals or relying on model-based judgment, while others demand hard guarantees where probabilistic enforcement is unacceptable — and today's tools are not built to navigate that tension. Until the community confronts this fragmentation and abandons clearly flawed approaches, true policy compliance in enterprise AI systems will remain an illusion.
Nathalie Baracaldo is a Senior Research Scientist and Master Inventor at IBM Research in San Jose, California. Her research currently focuses on safeguarding generative AI models through a variety of techniques, including unlearning and alignment. She has extensive experience delivering impactful machine learning solutions that are highly accurate, withstand adversarial attacks, and protect data privacy. She served as the primary investigator for the DARPA GARD program, where her focus was to ensure her team extended and maintained the Adversarial Robustness Toolbox (ART) to support red teaming evaluations. She also led the IBM federated learning effort and co-edited the book "Federated Learning: A Comprehensive Overview of Methods and Applications" Springer, 2022. In 2020 and 2021, she received the IBM Master Inventor distinction and the Corporate Technical Recognition, respectively. Her research has been published in top conferences in the fields of AI and Security, and has received multiple best paper awards and numerous citations. She received her doctorate degree from the University of Pittsburgh.
