Users often fall for phishing emails, reuse simple passwords, and fail to effectively utilize "provably" secure systems. These behaviors expose users to significant harm and frustrate industry practitioners and security researchers alike. As consequences of security breaches become ever more grave, it is important to study why humans behave seemingly irrationally. In this talk, I […]

Computing machinery such as smartphones are ubiquitous, and so will be smart home appliances, self-driving cars and robots in the near future. Enabling these machines with natural language understanding abilities opens up potential opportunities for the broader society to benefit from, e.g., in accessing the world’s knowledge, or in controlling complex machines with little effort. […]

While state-of-the-art machine learning models are deep, large-scale, sequential and highly nonconvex, the backbone of modern learning algorithms are simple algorithms such as stochastic gradient descent, or Q-learning (in the case of reinforcement learning tasks). A basic question endures---why do simple algorithms work so well even in these challenging settings? This talk focuses on two […]