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Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for March
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CS Colloquium: Yevgeniy Vorobeychik (Vanderbilt U) - Cyber Games: Attack Plan Interdiction and Adversarial Machine Learning
Mon, Mar 03, 2014 @ 01:00 PM - 02:30 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Yevgeniy Vorobeychik, Vanderbilt University
Talk Title: Cyber Games: Attack Plan Interdiction and Adversarial Machine Learning
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: Over the last few years I have been working on game theoretic models of security, with a particular emphasis on issues salient in cyber security. In this talk I will give an overview of some of this work. I will first spend some time motivating game theoretic treatment of problems relating to cyber and describe some important modeling considerations. In the remainder, I will describe two game theoretic models, and associated solution techniques and analyses. The first is the "optimal attack plan interdiction" problem. In this model, we view a threat formally as a sophisticated planning agent, aiming to achieve a set of goals given some specific initial capabilities and considering a space of possible "attack actions/vectors" that may (or may not) be used towards the desired ends. The defender's goal in this setting is to "interdict" a select subset of attack vectors by optimally choosing among mitigation options in order to prevent the attacker from being able to achieve its goals. I will describe the formal model, explain why it is challenging, and present highly scalable decomposition-based integer programming techniques that leverage extensive research into heuristic planning in AI. The second model addresses the problem of using machine learning to separate malware from goodware, where an adversary actively attempts to circumvent the resulting classifier. I will show how to formulate the problem of computing optimal randomized defense in this setting as a linear program which accounts both for adversarial response and operational constraints. Finally, I will show that our approach outperforms state of the art on several metrics.
Biography: Yevgeniy Vorobeychik is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Computer Engineering at Vanderbilt University. Previously (2010-2013), he was a Member of Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories. Between 2008 and 2010 he was a post-doctoral research associate at the University of Pennsylvania Computer and Information Science department. He received Ph.D. (2008) and M.S.E. (2004) degrees in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Michigan, and a B.S. degree in Computer Engineering from Northwestern University. His work focuses on game theoretic modeling of security, algorithmic and behavioral game theory and incentive design, optimization, complex systems, epidemic control, network economics, and machine learning. Dr. Vorobeychik has published over 50 research articles on these topics. Dr. Vorobeychik was nominated for the 2008 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award and received honorable mention for the 2008 IFAAMAS Distinguished Dissertation Award. In 2012 he was nominated for the Sandia Employee Recognition Award for Technical Excellence. He was also a recipient of a NSF IGERT interdisciplinary research fellowship at the University of Michigan, as well as a distinguished Computer Engineering undergraduate award at Northwestern University.
Host: Teamcore Group
Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 306
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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CS Colloquium: Damon McCoy (George Mason University) - Data-Driven Security: A Socio-Economic Approach to Disrupting Cybercrime
Tue, Mar 04, 2014 @ 04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Damon McCoy, George Mason University
Talk Title: Data-Driven Security: A Socio-Economic Approach to Disrupting Cybercrime
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: Modern day cybercrime is largely profit-fueled and much of modern day computer security is focused on developing new defenses that close security gaps, which allow criminals to exploit vulnerable systems. However, this focus on understanding the technical methods used by cyber criminals has not been matched by a complimentary effort to understand the underlying socio-economic factors that drive much of this large scale cybercrime. In this talk, I will describe my work on understanding the economics, capabilities and limitations of cybercriminal enterprises and how this has led to the disruption of two cybercrime ecosystems. First, I will describe the counterfeit pharmaceutical spam ecosystem from a socio-economic perspective and how this approach resulted in an effective payment processing level intervention. I will then describe an approach that also relies on a socio-economic understanding to disrupt the market for fraudulent accounts, which are sold by the thousand and are used to perpetrate scams, phishing, and malware via webmail and online social networking sites. These examples illustrate that, by understanding the socio-economic underpinnings of cybercrime, we can undermine cybercriminal ecosystems more efficiently than by using purely technical approaches.
Biography: Damon McCoy is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science department at George Mason University. Previously he was a Computer Innovation Fellow at the University of California, San Diego. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Colorado, Boulder. His research has focused on the economics of cybercrime, cyber-physical security, privacy enhancing technologies, and censorship-resistant systems. McCoy's work has been covered by the BBC, CNN, KrebsOnSecurity, MSNBC, NPR and NY Times. He was awarded a Google faculty research award and a CRA/NSF Computer Innovation Fellowship. He only refers to himself in the third person when requested.
Host: Ethan Katz-Bassett
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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CS Colloquium: Arunesh Sinha (CMU) - Audit Games
Wed, Mar 05, 2014 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Arunesh Sinha , Carnegie Mellon University
Talk Title: Audit Games
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: Audits complement real time access control in enforcement of policies (e.g., security and privacy policies). It is the primary tool for policy enforcement in scenarios where threats arise from authorized insiders. Considering the lack of provable guarantees of audit mechanisms in real world, there is a pressing need to develop mathematical models to study the audit process and design effective audit mechanisms. Our work aims to provide foundational work in the area of auditing by developing models that capture the essential characteristics of the audit process.Our approach is to model the audit interaction as a game between the organization and the auditees. As a first cut, we proposed an audit mechanism Regret Minimizing Audits, that provably optimizes cost for the organization, when the auditees’ incentives to violate are unknown. This is useful in scenarios like outsourced work, etc., where the auditee behavior cannot be modeled.
A natural intuition is that costs can be further optimized if assumptions are made about the auditee behavior. Following this intuition, we model a simple audit scenario with rational auditees as a Stackelberg game [2]. The main modeling novelty is the inclusion of different levels of punishment in the organization’s action space. The organization chooses a punishment level that maximizes its utility. The model is simple as it allows only one audit inspection. However, even the simple model results in a non-convex optimization problem for computing the equilibrium. Non-convex optimization problems are hard in general; we present a fully polynomial time approx. scheme (FPTAS) for our problem.
Biography: Arunesh Sinha is a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, where he is pursuing a PhD. He completed his undergraduate studies at IIT Kharagpur, where he majored in Electrical Engineering. Arunesh worked for four years as a software engineer in Trilogy Software, Bangalore, India, before deciding to do a Ph.D. Arunesh is fortunate to be advised by Prof. Anupam Datta. Arunesh's research interests lie at the intersection of security/privacy, game theory and machine learning.
Host: Teamcore Group
Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 306
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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CS Colloquium: Alice Gao (Harvard University) - Understanding Incentives in Social Computing
Tue, Mar 11, 2014 @ 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Alice Gao , Harvard University
Talk Title: Understanding Incentives in Social Computing
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: Social computing is an emerging field where human intelligence is harnessed in algorithmic problem solving. In particular, humans have or can efficiently gather relevant information about products, services and uncertain events and these information can be used to solve difficult problems. I have developed and analyzed such mechanisms for eliciting and aggregating dispersed information using both theoretical and experimental approaches. In this talk, I will focus on our online experiment on peer prediction mechanisms for eliciting truthful subjective feedback from participants. Peer prediction theory leverages the stochastic correlation of participants’ information and designs monetary rewards to induce a truthful equilibrium among the participants. However, these mechanisms also admit uninformative equilibria where participants provide no useful information. We conduct the first comprehensive empirical evaluation of a peer prediction mechanism in a repeated setting. Our results show that, in contrast to the theory, participants are not truthful and successfully coordinate on uninformative equilibria. In the absence of peer prediction, however, most players are consistently truthful, suggesting that these mechanisms may be harmful when truthful reporting has similar cost to strategic behavior. I will also describe some of my theoretical work on analyzing the strategic behavior of participants in prediction markets, and conclude by discussing some future directions.
This is based on joint work with Ryan P. Adams, Yiling Chen, Rick Goldstein, Ian A. Kash, Andrew Mao, and Jie Zhang.
Biography: Xi (Alice) Gao is a PhD candidate in Computer Science at Harvard University. Her research focuses on designing and understanding algorithms and systems in social computing, crowdsourcing and human computation, using both theoretical and experimental approaches. As part of her PhD work, Alice designed and analyzed the incentives in mechanisms for eliciting and aggregating dispersed information, for applications such as eliciting subjective feedback about products and services and forecasting future events. Alice is the recipient of the Canadian NSERC Postgraduate Scholarship for Doctoral Students and the Siebel Scholarship. Before Harvard, Alice received her undergraduate degree from University of British Columbia in computer science and mathematics.
Host: Teamcore Group
Location: Charles Lee Powell Hall (PHE) - 223
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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CS Colloquium: Sanjam Garg (IBM Research) - How to Obfuscate Software
Tue, Mar 11, 2014 @ 04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Sanjam Garg, IBM Research
Talk Title: How to Obfuscate Software
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: Software obfuscation aims to make the code of a computer program "unintelligible'' while preserving its functionality. This problem was first posed by Diffie and Hellman in 1976, and so far, most cryptographers believed that realizing obfuscation was impossible.
My research provides the first secure solution to this problem. Consequently several other long-standing open problems have been resolved. In this talk, I will describe these new developments and their implications.
Biography: Sanjam Garg is a Josef Raviv Memorial Postdoctoral Fellow at IBM Research T.J. Watson. His research interests are in cryptography and security, and more broadly in theoretical computer science. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2013 and his undergraduate degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi in 2008. Sanjam's Ph.D. thesis provides the first candidate constructions of multilinear maps that have found extensive applications in cryptography, most notably to software obfuscation. He has published several papers in top cryptography and security conferences and is the recipient of various honors such as the Outstanding Graduating Ph.D. Student award at UCLA and the best paper award at EUROCRYPT 2013
Host: Shaddin Dughmi
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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CS Colloquium: Thomas Karagiannis (Microsoft Research Cambridge UK) - Predictable Data Centers
Thu, Mar 13, 2014 @ 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Thomas Karagiannis, Microsoft Research Cambridge UK
Talk Title: Predictable Data Centers
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: In the talk, I will provide an overview of the Predictable Data Centers project at MSR Cambridge. The project tackles the issue of unpredictable application performance in data centers. A key contributor to such unpredictability is shared resources like network and storage, where the bandwidth across the cloud network and to the cloud storage service can vary significantly. To address this, PDC aims at designing an architecture that offers performance Service Level Agreements (SLAs) across shared resources by providing tenants with the abstraction of a dedicated virtual data center.
Host: CS Systems Group
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 322
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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CS Colloquium: Harsha V. Madhyastha (University of California Riverside) - Enabling the Software as a Service Revolution
Thu, Mar 13, 2014 @ 01:30 PM - 03:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Harsha V. Madhyastha, University of California Riverside
Talk Title: Enabling the Software as a Service Revolution
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: We are currently in the midst of a revolution with regards to how applications are delivered to users. Instead of simply shipping binaries that users install on their devices, application providers are increasingly shifting to the model of offering software services. Google Docs, Instagram, Dropbox, and Words with Friends are popular examples of this paradigm shift. In all of these cases, the use of software services enables application providers to offload application functionality from resource-constrained client devices such as smartphones and tablets, offer a seamless user experience across multiple devices, and enable content sharing.
However, the software as a service application model requires application providers to incur additional costs associated with hosting and managing service deployments. Software services also implicitly threaten user privacy and are constrained by the Internet in terms of the performance and availability perceived by users. In this talk, I will describe the existing best practices to address these challenges, highlight the problems associated with these best practices, and present an overview of three systems that we have developed to address these problems: SPANStore, WhyHigh, and LASTor. I will also discuss some of my ongoing projects and future plans for research in this space.
Biography: Harsha V. Madhyastha is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering department at University of California Riverside. His research interests broadly span the areas of distributed systems, networking, and security and privacy. Many of the systems developed as part of his research have been widely used and have had significant impact. For example, WhyHigh has reduced latencies to Google by an order of magnitude for millions of users, the MyPageKeeper system for detecting social malware is in use by over 20,000 Facebook users, and Internet topology and performance data from the iPlane system has been used in research projects at over 100 institutions. His work has also resulted in award papers at the USENIX NSDI and ACM SIGCOMM IMC conferences. His research is supported by the Army Research Laboratory (ARL), the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), Amazon, VMware, a Google Research award, a NetApp Faculty Fellowship, and an NSF CAREER award.
Host: Ethan Katz-Bassett
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 332
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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CS Distinguished Lecture: Leslie Kaelbling (CSAIL MIT) - Making Robots Behave
Thu, Mar 13, 2014 @ 04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: CS Distinguished Lecture: Leslie Kaelbling, CSAIL MIT
Talk Title: Making Robots Behave
Series: CS Distinguished Lectures
Abstract: The fields of AI and robotics have made great improvements in many individual subfields, including in motion planning, symbolic planning, probabilistic reasoning, perception, and learning. Our goal is to develop an integrated approach to solving very large problems that are hopelessly intractable to solve optimally. We make a number of approximations during planning, including serializing subtasks, factoring distributions, and determinizing stochastic dynamics, but regain robustness and effectiveness through a continuous state-estimation and replanning process. This approach is demonstrated in three robotic domains, each of which integrates perception, estimation, planning, and manipulation.
Biography: Leslie Pack Kaelbling is the Panasonic Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has made research contributions to decision-making under uncertainty, learning, and sensing with applications to robotics, with a particular focus on reinforcement learning and planning in partially observable domains.
She holds an A.B in Philosphy and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University, and has had research positions at SRI International and Teleos Research and a faculty position at Brown University. She is the recipient of the US National Science Foundation Presidential Faculty Fellowship, the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award, and several teaching prizes and has been elected a fellow of the AAAI. She was the founder and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Machine Learning Research.
Host: Nora Ayanian and Hao Li
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
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CS Colloquium: Emina Torlak (UC Berkeley) - Programming for Everyone: From Solvers to Solver-Aided Languages and Beyond
Thu, Mar 27, 2014 @ 04:00 PM - 05:30 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Emina Torlak, University of California, Berkeley
Talk Title: Programming for Everyone: From Solvers to Solver-Aided Languages and Beyond
Series: CS Colloquium
Abstract: We live in a software-driven world. Software helps us communicate and collaborate; create art and music; and make discoveries in biological, physical, and social sciences. Yet the growing demand for new software, to solve new kinds of problems, remains largely unmet. Because programming is still hard, developer productivity is limited, and so is end-users' ability to program on their own.
In this talk, I present a new approach to constructing programs, which exploits advances in constraint solving to make programming easier for experts and more accessible to everyone else. The approach is based on two observations. First, much of everyday programming involves the use of domain-specific languages (DSLs) that are embedded, in the form of APIs and interpreters, into modern host languages (for example, JavaScript, Scala or Racket). Second, productivity tools based on constraint solvers (such as verification or synthesis) work best when specialized to a given domain. Rosette is a new kind of host language, designed for easy creation of DSLs that are equipped with solver-based tools. These Solver-Aided DSLs (SDSLs) use Rosette's symbolic virtual machine (SVM) to automate hard programming tasks, including verification, debugging, synthesis, and programming with angelic oracles. The SVM works by compiling SDSL programs to logical constraints understood by SMT solvers, and then translating the solver's output to counterexamples (in the case of verification), traces (in the case of angelic execution), or code snippets (in the case of synthesis and debugging). Rosette has hosted several new SDSLs, including imperative SDSLs for data-parallel and spatial programming; a functional SDSL for specifying executable semantics of secure stack machines; and a declarative SDSL for web scraping by example.
Biography: Emina Torlak is a researcher at U.C. Berkeley, working at the intersection of software engineering, formal methods, and programming languages. Her focus is on developing tools that help people build better software more easily. She received her B.Sc. (2003), M.Eng. (2004) and Ph.D. (2009) from MIT, where she developed Kodkod, an efficient SAT-based solver for relational logic. Kodkod has since been used in over 70 tools for verification, debugging, and synthesis of code and specifications. Emina has also worked on a wide range of domain-specific formal methods. She won an ACM SIGSOFT distinguished paper award for her work at LogicBlox, where she built a system for synthesizing massive data sets, used in testing of decision support applications. As a member of IBM Research, she led the development of a tool for bounded verification of memory models, enabling the first fully automatic analysis of the Java Memory Model. These experiences inspired her current research on solver-aided languages, which aims to reduce the effort of applying formal methods to new problem domains.
Host: William Halfond
Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Assistant to CS chair
