Alumni | Security Research Group

Graduation 2019

5 June 2019 Weilin Xu, Yanjun Qi, alumni

Congratulations Dr. Xu!

15 April 2019 adversarial machine learning, Weilin Xu, alumni, PhD defense

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.

Violations of Children’s Privacy Laws

16 September 2018 privacy, Serge Egelman, alumni

The New York Times has an article, How Game Apps That Captivate Kids Have Been Collecting Their Data about a lawsuit the state of New Mexico is bringing against app markets (including Google) that allow apps presented as being for children in the Play store to violate COPPA rules and mislead users into tracking children. The lawsuit stems from a study led by Serge Egleman’s group at UC Berkeley that analyzed COPPA violations in children’s apps. Serge was an undergraduate student here (back in the early 2000s) – one of the things he did as a undergraduate was successfully sue a spammer.