CIS Seminar: “Rethinking System Design for Expressive Cryptography”

Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

Expressive cryptography, including Secure Multi-Party Computation (SMPC) and Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), has the potential to enable transformative new applications, drawing significant interest from industry. Unfortunately, it is often slow and resource-intensive, making those applications difficult to realize. For example, SMPC enables multiple organizations (e.g., hospitals) to run joint computations on their data (e.g., for […]

ASSET Seminar: Decision-Aware Learning for Global Health Supply Chains, Osbert Bastani (University of Pennsylvania)

Levine 307 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

Abstract: Machine learning algorithms are increasingly used in conjunction with optimization to guide decision making. A key challenge is aligning the machine learning loss with the decision-making loss. Existing solutions have limited flexibility and/or scale poorly to large datasets. We propose a principled decision-aware learning algorithm that uses a Taylor expansion of the optimal decision […]

CIS Seminar: “Methods of Data Lookup with Hashing”

Levine 307 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

We will discuss methods of data lookup, with a focus on hash sets / tables, including motivation, properties, and variants. This will be in the context of a "CS 2" or data structures course. We will assume a basic familiarity with programming and comfort with implementing resizable lists; as well as knowledge of (but not […]

CIS Seminar: “Birds of a Feather Flock Together: How Homophily Leads to Segregation, Inequality, and Inefficiency and What We Can Do About It”

Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

Humans exhibit a strong tendency to associate with those similar to them. This tendency, termed homophily in the social sciences, impacts both the structure of society and its outcomes. In this talk, Nicole Immorlica discusses the mathematics of homophily. She first quantifies its theoretical implications for geographic segregation. We will see that even tolerant societies […]

CIS Seminar: “Secure Computation with Minimal Interaction”

Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

In the current digital and decentralized world, there is an imminent need for technologies that can provide a fast approach to compute on private data while guaranteeing secrecy. Secure Multiparty Computation (MPC) is one such cryptographic technology that provides an efficient approach to compute on private data. At a high level, MPC is a distributed […]

CIS Seminar: “Cryptography, Security, and Law”

Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

My research focuses on the security, privacy, and transparency of technologies in societal and legal context. My talk will focus on three of my recent works in this space, relating to (1) preventing exploitation of stolen email data, (2) enhancing accountability in electronic surveillance, and (3) legal risks faced by security researchers.

Joseph Bordogna Forum: Dr. Gary May, Chancellor of UC-Davis

Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

Please save the date to join us for this annual distinguished lecture.  The Joseph Bordogna Forum will foster conversation and debate regarding important issues at the nexus of technology and society. It will feature lectures and panel discussions on a wide range of contemporary issues that are central to engineering including diversity and inclusion, the […]

CIS Seminar: “Privacy-Preserving Accountability Online”

Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

Technologies that enable confidential communication and anonymous authentication are important for improving privacy for users of internet services. Unfortunately, encryption and anonymity, while good for privacy, make it hard to hold bad actors accountable for misbehavior. Internet services rely on seeing message content to detect spam and other harmful content; services must also be able […]

ASSET Seminar: Statistical and Machine Learning for Electronic Health Records: Challenges and Opportunities, Qi Long (University of Pennsylvania)

Levine 307 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

ABSTRACT: Electronic health records (EHRs) offer great promises in advancing clinical research and transforming learning health systems. However, complex, temporal EHRs are fraught with biases and present daunting analytical challenges that, if not addressed, can exacerbate health inequities. EHRs data, recorded at irregular time intervals with varying frequencies, are multi-modal and multi-scale including structured data […]

CIS Seminar: ” Foundations of Responsible Machine Learning”

Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

Algorithms make predictions about people constantly.  The spread of such prediction systems has raised concerns that machine learning algorithms may exhibit problematic behavior, especially against individuals from marginalized groups.  This talk will provide an overview of my research building a theory of "responsible" machine learning.  I will highlight a notion of fairness in prediction, called […]