Logo: University of Southern California

Events Calendar



Select a calendar:



Filter March Events by Event Type:



Events for March 02, 2023

  • CS Colloquium: Dakshita Khurana (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) - Cryptographic Advances in Reasoning about Adversaries

    Thu, Mar 02, 2023 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

    Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Dakshita Khurana , University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

    Talk Title: Cryptographic Advances in Reasoning about Adversaries

    Series: CS Colloquium

    Abstract: A key challenge in cryptography is to ensure that a protocol resists all computationally feasible attacks, even when an adversary decides to follow a completely arbitrary and unpredictable strategy.
    This often turns out to be notoriously difficult -- for example, proofs of security must typically extract an adversary's implicit input, but this is at odds with other goals like privacy, which require that inputs be hidden and difficult to extract.

    In this talk, I will describe my work that reimagines how we reason about adversaries, thereby settling foundational questions in classical and quantum protocol design. On the classical front, these insights enable efficient verification of computations while preserving privacy, and immunize protocols against coordinated attacks on the internet. On the quantum front, these methods help exploit the "destructive" nature of measurements and open up fundamentally new possibilities for cryptography. I will discuss examples that leverage quantum information to (1) weaken the assumptions needed for core tasks like secure computation on distributed private data, and (2) allow outsourcing computations on sensitive data while also verifying that data was deleted after processing.


    This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Research Colloquium

    Biography: Dakshita Khurana is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her research focuses on cryptography and its interactions with quantum information. She has made several contributions to secure protocol design, including to succinct and zero-knowledge proof systems, non-malleable protocols and secure computation. Her work has also impacted fields beyond cryptography, e.g., by establishing the hardness of finding Nash equilibria under standard lattice assumptions. Her recent research enabling secure computation from weak cryptographic structure in the quantum regime was invited as one of the (long) plenary talks at QIP.
    Her research has also been recognized via invitations to the SIAM Journal on Computing, awarded to a select few papers at STOC and FOCS.

    Dakshita is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award, Visa Research faculty award, and a Graduate of Last Decade (GOLD) Alumni award from IIT-Delhi. In addition, her work has been funded through grants and gifts from the NSF, DARPA, C3AI and Jump Arches. She was named to Forbes List of 30 under 30 in Science and awarded a Google Research Fellowship at the Simons Institute, Berkeley. Her thesis work was previously recognized with a UCLA Dissertation Year Fellowship, a UCLA CS Outstanding PhD Student Award and Outstanding Graduate Awards from Symantec and CISCO.



    Host: Jiapeng Zhang

    Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 132

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Assistant to CS chair

    OutlookiCal
  • Viterbi Keynote Lecture: Learning to Communicate

    Thu, Mar 02, 2023 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM

    Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

    Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars


    Speaker: Dr. Robert Calderbank, Charles S. Sydnor Distinguished Professor of Computer Science, Duke University

    Talk Title: Learning to Communicate

    Series: Viterbi Lecture

    Abstract: It is common knowledge that a time-domain pulse is well adapted to pure delay channels, and that a frequency domain pulse is well adapted to pure Doppler channels. In this talk we will explain why the Zak-OTFS waveform, a pulse in the delay-Doppler domain, is well adapted to the doubly spread channels that arise in wireless communication.
    We will describe how to design the Zak-OTFS waveform so that the input-output (IO) relation is predictable and non-fading, and we will explain how it is possible to learn the IO relation without needing to estimate the underlying channel. We will explore the possibility of a model-free mode of operation, which is especially useful when a traditional model-dependent mode of operation (reliant on channel estimation) is out of reach. We will also describe how the Zak-OTFS waveform supports combined communication and sensing by enabling unambiguous delay-Doppler estimation.

    This is joint work with Saif Mohammed, Ananthanarayanan Chockalingam, and Ronny Hadani.


    Biography: Dr. Calderbank directs the Rhodes Information Initiative at Duke University, where he is a Distinguished Professor. He is known for contributions to voiceband modem technology, to quantum information theory, and for co-invention of space-time codes for wireless communication. His research papers have been cited more than 50,000 times, and his inventions are found in billions of consumer devices. Dr. Calderbank was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2005, to the National Academy of Inventors in 2015, and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2022. He has received a number of awards, including the 2013 IEEE Hamming Medal for contributions to information transmission, and the 2015 Claude E. Shannon Award.

    Host: Dr. Richard M. Leahy, leahy@sipi.usc.edu

    Webcast: https://usc.zoom.us/j/99839989058?pwd=MDFvNWxZNUg1VURjL3EyTDlJekViZz09

    More Information: 20230302 Calderbank Print.pdf

    Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - EEB 132

    WebCast Link: https://usc.zoom.us/j/99839989058?pwd=MDFvNWxZNUg1VURjL3EyTDlJekViZz09

    Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

    Contact: Mayumi Thrasher

    OutlookiCal