Graduation 2019
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How AI could save lives without spilling medical secrets
I’m quoted in this article by Will Knight focused on the work Oasis Labs (Dawn Song’s company) is doing on privacy-preserving medical data analysis: How AI could save lives without spilling medical secrets, MIT Technology Review, 14 May 2019.
“The whole notion of doing computation while keeping data secret is an incredibly powerful one,” says David Evans, who specializes in machine learning and security at the University of Virginia. When applied across hospitals and patient populations, for instance, machine learning might unlock completely new ways of tying disease to genomics, test results, and other patient information.
Cost-Sensitive Adversarial Robustness at ICLR 2019
Xiao Zhang will present Cost-Sensitive Robustness against Adversarial Examples on May 7 (4:30-6:30pm) at ICLR 2019 in New Orleans.
Paper: [PDF] [OpenReview] [ArXiv]
Empirically Measuring Concentration
Xiao Zhang and Saeed Mahloujifar will present our work on Empirically Measuring Concentration: Fundamental Limits on Intrinsic Robustness at two workshops May 6 at ICLR 2019 in New Orleans: Debugging Machine Learning Models and Safe Machine Learning: Specification, Robustness and Assurance.
Paper: [PDF]
SRG Lunch
Some photos for our lunch to celebrate the end of semester, beginning of summer, and congratulate Weilin Xu on his PhD:
Left to right: Jonah Weissman, Yonghwi Kown, Bargav Jayaraman, Aihua Chen, Hannah Chen, Weilin Xu, Riley Spahn, David Evans, Fnu Suya, Yuan Tian, Mainuddin Jonas, Tu Le, Faysal Hossain, Xiao Zhang, Jack Verrier
JASON Spring Meeting: Adversarial Machine Learning
I had the privilege of speaking at the JASON Spring Meeting, undoubtably one of the most diverse meetings I’ve been part of with talks on hypersonic signatures (from my DSSG 2008-2009 colleague, Ian Boyd), FBI DNA, nuclear proliferation in Iran, engineering biological materials, and the 2020 census (including a very interesting presentatino from John Abowd on the differential privacy mechanisms they have developed and evaluated). (Unfortunately, my lack of security clearance kept me out of the SCIF used for the talks on quantum computing and more sensitive topics).
Congratulations Dr. Xu!
Congratulations to Weilin Xu for successfully defending his PhD Thesis!
Weilin's Committee: Homa Alemzadeh, Yanjun Qi, Patrick McDaniel (on screen), David Evans, Vicente Ordóñez Román Improving Robustness of Machine Learning Models using Domain Knowledge Although machine learning techniques have achieved great success in many areas, such as computer vision, natural language processing, and computer security, recent studies have shown that they are not robust under attack. A motivated adversary is often able to craft input samples that force a machine learning model to produce incorrect predictions, even if the target model achieves high accuracy on normal test inputs. This raises great concern when machine learning models are deployed for security-sensitive tasks.
A Plan to Eradicate Stalkerware
Sam Havron (BSCS 2017) is quoted in an article in Wired on eradicating stalkerware:
The full extent of that stalkerware crackdown will only prove out with time and testing, says Sam Havron, a Cornell researcher who worked on last year’s spyware study. Much more work remains. He notes that domestic abuse victims can also be tracked with dual-use apps often overlooked by antivirus firms, like antitheft software Cerberus. Even innocent tools like Apple’s Find My Friends and Google Maps’ location-sharing features can be abused if they don’t better communicate to users that they may have been secretly configured to share their location. “This is really exciting news,” Havron says of Kaspersky’s stalkerware change. “Hopefully it will spur the rest of the industry to follow suit. But it’s just the very first thing.”
ISMR 2019: Context-aware Monitoring in Robotic Surgery
Samin Yasar presented our paper on Context-award Monitoring in Robotic Surgery at the 2019 International Symposium on Medical Robotics (ISMR) in Atlanta, Georgia.
Robotic-assisted minimally invasive surgery (MIS) has enabled procedures with increased precision and dexterity, but surgical robots are still open loop and require surgeons to work with a tele-operation console providing only limited visual feedback. In this setting, mechanical failures, software faults, or human errors might lead to adverse events resulting in patient complications or fatalities. We argue that impending adverse events could be detected and mitigated by applying context-specific safety constraints on the motions of the robot. We present a context-aware safety monitoring system which segments a surgical task into subtasks using kinematics data and monitors safety constraints specific to each subtask. To test our hypothesis about context specificity of safety constraints, we analyze recorded demonstrations of dry-lab surgical tasks collected from the JIGSAWS database as well as from experiments we conducted on a Raven II surgical robot. Analysis of the trajectory data shows that each subtask of a given surgical procedure has consistent safety constraints across multiple demonstrations by different subjects. Our preliminary results show that violations of these safety constraints lead to unsafe events, and there is often sufficient time between the constraint violation and the safety-critical event to allow for a corrective action.
Deep Fools
New Electronics has an article that includes my Deep Learning and Security Workshop talk: Deep fools, 21 January 2019.
A better version of the image Mainuddin Jonas produced that they use (which they screenshot from the talk video) is below:
