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Events for February 22, 2016
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CS Seminar: Jim Boerkoel (Harvey Mudd) - Temporal Planning for Robust Human-Robot Teamwork
Mon, Feb 22, 2016 @ 12:00 AM - 01:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Jim Boerkoel, Harvey Mudd
Talk Title: Temporal Planning for Robust Human-Robot Teamwork
Series: CS Seminar Series
Abstract: Our work explores what it takes for teams of robots and humans to schedule robust interactions in the messiness of the real world.Temporal planning enables robots to automatically coordinate when the activities in their schedule should occur. In general, we want temporal plans that are adaptable to events that are beyond the direct control of agents; e.g., a robot may experience slippage or sensor failures. To do this, we must answer two questions: (1) how and when do new or unexpected events arise in practice?, and (2) how "good" is the temporal plan at adapting to unexpected events that might otherwise invalidate the plan? We have proposed a new metric called robustness, which assesses the likelihood that a multi-robot plan succeeds. We have shown that robustness is a better measure of multi-robot plan quality and that we can generate plans that optimize for robustness.
We also explore how to plan and schedule robots' interactions with humans on shared activities so that the exchanges are fluid and intuitive. For instance, one of our ongoing projects considers whether an agent can learn about the experiences of its human teammate in order to nudge them towards more optimal behavior. Another considers the roles that trust and cooperation play in human-robot interactions and how these differ from how humans trust and cooperate with each other.
Learn more: https://www.cs.hmc.edu/HEAT/
Host: Sven Koenig
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 322
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor.
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CS Colloquium: Muhammad Naveed (UIUC) - Making the World a Better Place with Cryptography
Mon, Feb 22, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Muhammad Naveed, UIUC
Talk Title: Making the World a Better Place with Cryptography
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reports that the health records of up to 86% of the U.S. population have been hacked. The Ashley Madison breach revealed the private information of 37 million individuals and led to suicides and shattered families. The Apple iCloud breach led to the public release of nude photos of several celebrities. Data breaches like these abound.
In this talk, I will first describe my research toward understanding the security of existing data breach prevention systems. To thwart data breaches, property-preserving encryption has been adopted in many encrypted database systems such as CryptDB, Microsoft Cipherbase, Google Encrypted BigQuery, SAP SEEED, and the soon-to-be-shipped Microsoft SQL Always Encrypted system. To simultaneously attain practicality and functionality, property-preserving encryption schemes permit the leakage of certain information such as the relative order of encrypted messages. I will explain the practical implications of permitting such leakage, and show in real-world contexts that property-preserving encryption often does not offer strong enough security.
Next, I will describe an application-driven approach to developing practical cryptography to secure sensitive data. The approach involves collaborating with application domain experts to formulate the requirements; investigating whether a practical solution meeting the requirements is possible; and, if not, exploring the reasons behind it to relax the requirements so as to find a useful solution for the application. I will describe how I developed a cryptographic model called Controlled Functional Encryption (CFE), and how we can adopt CFE to address the privacy concerns in emerging applications such as personalized medicine.
Biography: Muhammad Naveed is a PhD candidate at UIUC studying applied cryptography and systems security. In applied cryptography, he develops practical-yet-provably-secure cryptographic systems for real applications. In systems security, he explores the fundamental security flaws in popular systems and builds defense systems. His work has had a significant impact on Android security and has helped companies such as Google, Samsung, Facebook, and Amazon secure their products and services, improving security for millions of Android users. He is the recipient of the Google PhD Fellowship in Security, the Sohaib and Sara Abbasi Fellowship, the CS@Illinois C.W. Gear Outstanding Graduate Student Award, and the best paper award at the NYU CSAW Security Research Competition. He was also a finalist in the NYU CSAW Cybersecurity Policy Competition.
Host: CS Department
Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 136
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor. -
CS Colloquium: Robert West (Stanford) - Human Behavior in Networks
Mon, Feb 22, 2016 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Robert West, Stanford
Talk Title: Human Behavior in Networks
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium
Humans as well as information are organized in networks. Interacting with these networks is part of our daily lives: we talk to friends in our social network; we find information by navigating the Web; and we form opinions by listening to others and to the media. Thus, understanding, predicting, and enhancing human behavior in networks poses important research problems for computer and data science with practical applications of high impact. In this talk I will present some of my work in this area, focusing on (1) human navigation of information networks and (2) person-to-person opinions in social networks.
Network navigation constitutes a fundamental human behavior: in order to make use of the information and resources around us, we constantly explore, disentangle, and navigate networks such as the Web. Studying navigation patterns lets us understand better how humans reason about complex networks and lets us build more human-friendly information systems. As an example, I will present an algorithm for improving website hyperlink structure by mining raw web server logs. The resulting system is being deployed on Wikipedia's full server logs at terabyte scale, producing links that are clicked 10 times as frequently as the average link added by human Wikipedia editors.
Communication and coordination through natural language is another prominent human network behavior. Studying the interplay of social network structure and language has the potential to benefit both sociolinguistics and natural language processing. Intriguing opportunities and challenges have arisen recently with the advent of online social media, which produce large amounts of both network and natural language data. As an example, I will discuss my work on person-to-person sentiment analysis in social networks, which combines the sociological theory of structural balance with techniques from natural language processing, resulting in a sentiment prediction model that clearly outperforms both text-only and network-only versions.
I will conclude the talk by sketching interesting future directions for computational approaches to studying and enhancing human behavior in networks.
The lecture will be available to stream HERE. Please Open in New Tab for best results.
Biography: Robert West is a sixth-year Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science in the Infolab at Stanford University, advised by Jure Leskovec. His research aims to understand, predict, and enhance human behavior in social and information networks by developing techniques in data science, data mining, network analysis, machine learning, and natural language processing. Previously, he obtained a Master's degree from McGill University in 2010 and a Diplom degree from Technische Universität München in 2007.
Host: CS Department
Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
This event is open to all eligible individuals. USC Viterbi operates all of its activities consistent with the University's Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor.
