CIS

Protecting secrets within computer systems is a central mission of cryptography. Program obfuscation, which scrambles computer code without harming its functionality, is an immensely powerful and versatile tool for accomplishing this task that has been the subject of intense study in classical cryptography. Yet, the ability to obfuscate quantum computation had previously remained elusive to […]

Academics and political practitioners around the world are experimenting with a class of democratic innovations called deliberative mini-publics (DMs). In a DM, a panel of constituents convenes to deliberate about specific issues and make policy recommendations to traditional political decision-makers (e.g., legislators). Nearly all DMs rely on sortition – random selection – to choose the panelists. Sortition is often thought of as […]

Large language models (LMs) such as ChatGPT have revolutionized natural language processing and artificial intelligence more broadly. In this talk, I will discuss my research on understanding and advancing these models, centered around how they use the very large text corpora they are trained on. First, I will describe our efforts to understand how these […]

The ever-increasing scale of foundation models, such as ChatGPT and AlphaFold, has revolutionized AI and science more generally. However, increasing scale also steadily raises computational barriers, blocking almost everyone from studying, adapting, or otherwise using these models for anything beyond static API queries. In this talk, I will present research that significantly lowers these barriers […]

Machine learning models pretrained on internet data have acquired broad knowledge about the world but struggle to solve complex tasks that require extended reasoning and planning. Sequential decision making, on the other hand, has empowered AlphaGo’s superhuman performance, but lacks visual, language, and physical knowledge about the world. In this talk, I will present my […]

In many computer systems today, an attacker that breaks one system component can steal data from millions of users. In this talk, I will present three systems that can withstand component compromise. I will describe (1) a single sign-on system that protects user security and privacy from a compromised single sign-on server, (2) a secure-hardware-based […]