- talks - lists.cs.princeton.edu

Barak Nehoran will present his General Exam "The Computational Power of Quantum Interaction Through Classical Channels" on Friday, October 8, 2021 at 1PM via Zoom.
by jfarquer＠cs.princeton.edu 04 Oct '21

04 Oct '21

Barak Nehoran will present his General Exam on Friday, October 8, 2021 at 1PM via Zoom. Zoom Link: <https://princeton.zoom.us/j/92536310724?pwd=TjI5VytxWlV0M1I1TlRmL2duNjB0dz0 9> https://princeton.zoom.us/j/92536310724?pwd=TjI5VytxWlV0M1I1TlRmL2duNjB0dz09 The members of his committee are as follows: Ran Raz(adviser), Mark Zhandry(adviser), and Gillat Kol. Everyone is invited to attend his talk, and those faculty wishing to remain for the oral exam following are welcome to do so. His abstract and reading list follow below. Title: The Computational Power of Quantum Interaction Through Classical Channels Abstract: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kpLoZzUbynghf1pYy-Hbph7KT6voWijX9FnrdUoj _V8/edit?usp=sharing Reading List: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-uw4ESeKypRI2kJtH2lihD3nmP5r8KCGr2RTtwkE fdE/edit?usp=sharing

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Jordan Holland will present his Pre-FPO "New Directions in Network Traffic Analysis" on Thursday, October 7, 2021 at 1PM via Zoom.
by jfarquer＠cs.princeton.edu 04 Oct '21

04 Oct '21

Jordan Holland will present his Pre-FPO " New Directions in Network Traffic Analysis" on Thursday, October 7, 2021 at 1PM via Zoom. Zoom link: https://princeton.zoom.us/j/91304375990 Committee: Examiners: Nick Feamster (Adviser), Prateek Mittal, Ravi Netravali Readers: Jonathan Mayer and Vitaly Shmatikov (Cornell) All are welcome to attend. Title: New Directions in Network Traffic Analysis Abstract: The field of network traffic analysis has long focused on creating bespoke solutions for specific problems. More recently, the field has examined the effectiveness of machine learning techniques for a wide range of traffic analysis problems. This approach follows a specific pattern: collect network traffic, create a data processing pipeline to appropriately separate the traffic (e.g. traffic flows, applications, devices) and attach labels to the separated traffic, hand-engineer features specific to the task, and finally train models on the engineered features. This methodology, combined with the number and variety of problems comprising network traffic analysis, has led to the creation of custom analysis pipelines for each task, requiring custom data processing pipelines, new features, and new models. In this talk, we discuss the feasibility of using generalizable techniques for multiple steps in the typical traffic analysis pipeline. First, we introduce nPrint, a tool that generates a unified packet representation that is amenable for representation learning and model training. We integrate nPrint with automated machine learning (AutoML), resulting in nPrintML, an open-source system that eliminates manual feature engineering and model selection for a number of problems. Next, we examine how custom data processing pipelines affect reproducibility in the field. We inspect work leveraging multiple popular datasets and find that current practices render both comparing and reproducing work difficult. We then introduce pcapML, an open-source system that standardizes traffic analysis tasks at the dataset level, improving reproducibility and lowering the barrier to entry for testing new traffic analysis techniques.

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Best Practices in Python Packaging - NOW OFFERING ZOOM OPTION
by Emily C. Lawrence 28 Sep '21

28 Sep '21

Now offering in person (for Princeton affiliates only) and Zoom webinar (non-Princeton and off-campus Princeton affiliates): REGISTRATION IS REQUIRED FOR BOTH Attending in person: [ https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSetxqgVqlgnNQwHKJ-IFA_V84gY2YxFip_… | REGISTER HERE ] Zoom webinar: [ https://princeton.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_NIQuLIkvQS-UlwnYdywGRA | ZOOM WEBINAR REGISTER HERE ] DataX Workshop Series: Best Practices in Python Packaging [ https://csml.princeton.edu/news/datax-brian-arnold-using-data-science-answe… | Brian Arnold ] , DataX Biomedical Data Scientist [ https://csml.princeton.edu/news/solving-technical-debt-dilemma-princetons-m… | Vineet Bansal ] , Sr. Research Software Engineer October 1, 2021 9:00 am Location: 26 Prospect Avenue, Room 103 Seating is limited – please reserve your spot early! This workshop is for researchers who are already using Python for their work, but who want to distribute their software to the broader scientific community by packaging their code for other researchers to easily use. We will learn about structuring our code as modules and packages, and publishing packages on PyPI and conda, both of which are commonly used in the life sciences to install open-source software. We will gain insights into ensuring reproducibility in research through the process of versioning, continuous integration and testing. Finally, we will look at a sample Python project that puts all these best practices together. [ https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSetxqgVqlgnNQwHKJ-IFA_V84gY2YxFip_… | REGISTER HERE ]

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NEXT FRIDAY WORKSHOP: Best Practices in Python Packaging
by Emily C. Lawrence 22 Sep '21

22 Sep '21

DataX Workshop Series: Best Practices in Python Packaging [ https://csml.princeton.edu/news/datax-brian-arnold-using-data-science-answe… | Brian Arnold ] , DataX Biomedical Data Scientist [ https://csml.princeton.edu/news/solving-technical-debt-dilemma-princetons-m… | Vineet Bansal ] , Sr. Research Software Engineer October 1, 2021 9:00 am Location: 26 Prospect Avenue, Room 103 Seating is limited – please reserve your spot early! This workshop is for researchers who are already using Python for their work, but who want to distribute their software to the broader scientific community by packaging their code for other researchers to easily use. We will learn about structuring our code as modules and packages, and publishing packages on PyPI and conda, both of which are commonly used in the life sciences to install open-source software. We will gain insights into ensuring reproducibility in research through the process of versioning, continuous integration and testing. Finally, we will look at a sample Python project that puts all these best practices together. [ https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSetxqgVqlgnNQwHKJ-IFA_V84gY2YxFip_… | REGISTER HERE ]

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Kathleen Chen will present her General Exam "A sequence-based global map of regulatory activity for deciphering human genetics" on Monday, September 27, 2021 at 11:30AM via Zoom
by jfarquer＠cs.princeton.edu 21 Sep '21

21 Sep '21

Kathleen Chen will present her General Exam "A sequence-based global map of regulatory activity for deciphering human genetics" on Monday, September 27, 2021 at 11:30AM via Zoom. Zoom Link: https://princeton.zoom.us/j/96378734253 The members of Kathleen's committee are as follows: Olga Troyanskaya (adviser), Mona Singh, Yuri Pritykin Title: A sequence-based global map of regulatory activity for deciphering human genetics Everyone is invited to attend the talk, and those faculty wishing to remain for the oral exam following are welcome to do so. Abstract: Sequence is at the basis of how the genome shapes chromatin organization, regulates gene expression, and impacts traits and diseases. Epigenomic profiling efforts have enabled large-scale identification of regulatory elements, yet we still lack a sequence-based map to systematically identify regulatory activities from any sequence, which is necessary for predicting the effects of any variant on these activities. We address this challenge with Sei, a new framework for integrating human genetics data with sequence information to discover the regulatory basis of traits and diseases. Our framework systematically learns a vocabulary for the regulatory activities of sequences, which we call sequence classes, using a new deep learning model that predicts a compendium of 21,907 chromatin profiles across >1,300 cell lines and tissues, the most comprehensive to-date. Sequence classes allow for a global view of sequence and variant effects by quantifying diverse regulatory activities, such as loss or gain of cell-type-specific enhancer function. We show that sequence class predictions are supported by experimental data, including tissue-specific gene expression, expression QTLs, and evolutionary constraints based on population allele frequencies. Finally, we applied our framework to human genetics data. Sequence classes uniquely provide a non-overlapping partitioning of GWAS heritability by tissue-specific regulatory activity categories, which we use to characterize the regulatory architecture of 47 traits and diseases from UK Biobank. Furthermore, the predicted loss or gain of sequence class activities suggest specific mechanistic hypotheses for individual regulatory pathogenic mutations. We provide this framework as a resource to further elucidate the sequence basis of human health and disease. Reading List: Textbook: Jones, N.C. and Pevzner, P.A. An Introduction to Bioinformatics Algorithms. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (2004). Papers: 1. Zhou, J. et al. "Deep learning sequence-based ab initio prediction of variant effects on expression and disease risk." Nat Genetics vol. 50,8 (2018): 1171-1179. doi:10.1038/s41588-018-0160-6 2. Zhou, J., Park, C.Y, et al. Theesfeld, C.L. et al. "Whole-genome deep-learning analysis identifies contribution of noncoding mutations to autism risk." Nat Genetics 51, 973-980 (2019). 3. Kelley, D.R., et al. "Sequential regulatory activity prediction across chromosomes with convolutional neural networks." Genome Res 28(5), 739-750 (2018). 4. Avsec et al. "Base-resolution models of transcription-factor binding reveal soft motif syntax." Nat Genetics 53, 354-366 (2021). 5. Edwards, S.L. et al. "Beyond GWASs: illuminating the dark road from association to function." American Journal of Human Genetics vol. 93,5 (2013): 779-97. 6. Boix, C.A. et al. "Regulatory genomic circuitry of human disease loci by integrative epigenomics." Nature 590, 300-307 (2021). 7. Chen et al. "Determinants of transcription factor regulatory range." Nat Communications 11, 2472 (2020). 8. Rheinbay E. et al. "Analyses of non-coding somatic drivers in 2,658 cancer whole genomes." Nature 578, 102-111 (2020). 9. Weissbrod O. et al. "Functionally informed fine-mapping and polygenic localization of complex trait heritability." Nat Genetics 52, 1355-1363 (2020).

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Comparative Literature talk: Dennis Tenen, 9/23 at 4:30PM
by Emily C. Lawrence 20 Sep '21

20 Sep '21

Dearest colleagues, The Department of Comparative Literature is proud to welcome Professor Dennis Tenen of Columbia University to give the first lecture in this year’s departmental lecture series. This year’s lecture series is entitled “Virtually Here, Virtually So ” and it aims at thinking through the many meanings of the word “virtual” i ncluding, but by no means limited to, virtual reality, things that are “virtually" the same yet profoundly different, and the similarities and discrepancies between our “true” selves and our “virtual” selves. Professor Tenen is the author of " Plain Text: The Poetics of Computation" (2017) and his work lies at the intersection of literary theory, new media studies, and coding studies. He will be presenting a lecture entitled “Media and Metaphor (Or How Literary Theory Figures in the Study of Human Computer Interaction)” on Thursday September 23rd at 4:30 PM in East Pyne 010 . The talk will be immediately followed by a small reception just outside of the auditorium. There are also limited spots available for dinner with Professor Tenen at 6:30 PM after the lecture at 6:30PM. If you are interested in joining us for dinner or have any questions or concerns, please address them to Daniel Dominguez ( [ mailto:dd10@princeton.edu | dd10(a)princeton.edu ] ). We hope everyone has a wonderful week and we sincerely hope you’ll join us this week to listen to Professor Tenen speak. Best wishes, Daniel Dominguez Series Organizer

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Khiem Ngo will present his FPO "TOLERATING SLOWDOWNS IN REPLICATED STATE MACHINES" on Wednesday, August 25, 2021 at 3PM via Zoom.
by jfarquer＠cs.princeton.edu 19 Aug '21

19 Aug '21

Khiem Ngo will present his FPO "TOLERATING SLOWDOWNS IN REPLICATED STATE MACHINES" on Wednesday, August 25, 2021 at 3PM via Zoom. Zoom link: https://princeton.zoom.us/j/97848004548 The members of Khiem's committee are as follows: Wyatt Lloyd (Adviser); Readers: Amit Levy and Siddhartha Sen (Microsoft Research); Examiners: Michael Freedman, Ravi Netravali, Wyatt Lloyd. A copy of his thesis is available upon request. Please email gradinfo(a)cs.princeton.edu <mailto:gradinfo@cs.princeton.edu> if you would like a copy of the thesis. All are welcome to attend his talk. Abstract follows below: Replicated state machines (RSMs) are linearizable, fault-tolerant groups of replicas that are coordinated using a consensus algorithm. RSMs are used throughout large-scale sys[1]tems, such as distributed databases, cloud storage, and service managers. At such scale, it is common for some machines to be slow. In this dissertation, we address the prob[1]lem of developing slowdown-tolerant RSMs that continue to operate as fast RSMs despite the presence of slow replicas. We define s-slowdown-tolerance and identify why existing consensus protocols are not slowdown-tolerant. As the first and pragmatic step toward slowdown-tolerant RSMs, we design, implement, and evaluate two 1-slowdown-tolerant consensus protocols, Copilot and Latent Copilot. Copilot replication is the first 1-slowdown-tolerant consensus protocol: it delivers normal latency despite the slowdown of any 1 replica. Copilot uses two distinguished replicas-the pilot and copilot-to proactively add redundancy to all stages of processing a client's command. Copilot uses dependencies and deduplication to resolve potentially differing orderings proposed by the pilots. To avoid dependencies leading to either pilot being able to slow down the group, Copilot uses fast takeovers that allow a fast pilot to complete the ongoing work of a slow pilot. Copilot includes two optimizations-ping[1]pong batching and null dependency elimination-that improve its performance when there are 0 and 1 slow pilots respectively. Our evaluation of Copilot shows its performance is lower but competitive with Multi-Paxos and EPaxos when no replicas are slow. When a replica is slow, Copilot is the only protocol that avoids high latencies. Latent Copilot, a variant of Copilot, is another design and implementation of a 1- slowdown-tolerant consensus protocol. Latent Copilot operates with one active pilot, which actively proposes commands, and one latent pilot, which proposes commands only when necessary. In this way, Latent Copilot achieves an intermediate tradeoff between Multi[1]Paxos and Copilot in terms of throughput and slowdown tolerance. Our evaluation of La[1]iii tent Copilot shows that it achieves 1-slowdown-tolerance and that its performance with no slowdowns is comparable to Multi-Paxos. Finally, we generalize the design of Copilot replication to handle more than one slow[1]down. We provide the design of an s-slowdown-tolerant protocol that achieves slowdown tolerance despite s slow replicas.

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Fermi Ma will present his FPO "Quantum Security and Fiat-Shamir for Cryptographic Protocols" on Tuesday, August 24, 2021 at 4pm via Zoom.
by jfarquer＠cs.princeton.edu 16 Aug '21

16 Aug '21

Fermi Ma will present his FPO "Quantum Security and Fiat-Shamir for Cryptographic Protocols" on Tuesday, August 24, 2021 at 4pm via Zoom. Zoom link: https://princeton.zoom.us/j/97642906902 The members of his committee are as follows: Mark Zhandry (Adviser); Readers: Zeev Dvir, Ran Raz; Examiners: Sanjeev Arora, Gillat Kol, and Mark Zhandry. A copy of his thesis is available upon request. Please email gradinfo(a)cs.princeton.edu <mailto:gradinfo@cs.princeton.edu> if you would like a copy of the thesis. Everyone is invited to attend his talk. Abstract: This talk will cover new results on the security of cryptographic protocols in the quantum setting and the Fiat-Shamir heuristic for removing interaction. (1) Quantum Rewinding. Many cryptosystems are proven secure by rewinding an interactive adversary to extract its responses across multiple invocations. Unfortunately, this technique only suffices for classical security, since recording the outputs of a quantum adversary may irreversibly damage its state. Obtaining a suitable quantum analogue of rewinding has been a long-standing open problem in post-quantum cryptography. In this talk, I will describe a general-purpose quantum rewinding procedure capable of extracting an unlimited number of responses from any quantum adversary; prior techniques were limited to a constant number. Our primary application is to prove that Kilian's succinct argument system for NP is post-quantum secure. (2) Quantum Secure Computation from One-Way Functions. Next, I will cover results on multi-party computation, a central primitive in cryptography that enables mutually distrusting parties to compute a shared function over their inputs while revealing no other information. We show that when all parties are quantum, secure multi-party computation can be based solely on the existence of the minimal cryptographic primitive: one-way functions. This is in stark contrast to the classical setting where such an implication is not known, and is considered unlikely. (3) The Security of Fiat-Shamir. The final part of this talk will cover the soundness of the Fiat-Shamir heuristic, a powerful technique that uses a cryptographic hash function to remove interaction from certain cryptographic protocols. We consider two popular applications of Fiat-Shamir: building non-interactive succinct arguments from Kilian's protocol and obtaining digital signatures from a wide range of identification protocols. We demonstrate significant barriers to soundly instantiating Fiat-Shamir for Kilian's succinct arguments using any concrete Fiat-Shamir hash function. We also raise the interesting possibility that natural identification protocols can be compiled with simple, non-cryptographic Fiat-Shamir hash functions.

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Friday, August 13, 2021 - Princeton Wireless Distinguished Seminar Series - Sumit Roy, University of Washington
by Emily C. Lawrence 06 Aug '21

06 Aug '21

ECE Princeton Wireless Distinguished Seminar Series Speaker: Sumit Roy, University of Washington Title: Future Vehicular Radars: Two Aspects Day: Friday, August 13, 2021 Time: 1:00 pm Room: Please register here: [ https://princeton.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJAvd-2rqjkuHdQcCp7MUlGrW7CSb3Th… | https://princeton.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJAvd-2rqjkuHdQcCp7MUlGrW7CSb3Th… ] Host: Yasaman Ghasempour Abstract: This talk will present an overview of recent research in FUNLAB around the use of vehicular radar for advanced driver assistance systems (en route to a future vision of autonomous driving). Wideband (typically FMCW or chirp) radars are being increasingly deployed onboard vehicles as key high-resolution sensor for environmental mapping/imaging and various safety features. The talk will focus on the evolving role of radar `cognition’ in complex operating environments to address two important future challenges: 1. Mitigating multi-access interference among Radars (e.g. dense traffic scenario) The talk will first illustrate the impact of mutual interference on detection performance in Chirp/FMCW radars and then highlight some multi-access protocol design approaches for effective resource sharing among multiple radars. 2. Contributions to radar vision via new radar hardware (MIMO radar) + associated advanced signal processing (Synthetic Aperture principles) as well as Convolutional Neural Network (`Radar Net’) based machine learning approach for enhanced object detection/classification in challenging circumstances. Bio: Sumit Roy received the B. Tech. degree from the Indian Institute of Technology (Kanpur) in 1983, and the M. S. and Ph. D. degrees from the University of California (Santa Barbara), all in Electrical Engineering in 1985 and 1988 respectively, as well as an M. A. in Statistics and Applied Probability in 1988. He is currently Professor, Electrical & Comp. Engineering, appointed to a term Distinguished Professorship for Integrated Systems (2014-19); since Sep. 2020, he serves as a rotator for US Dept. of Defense’s Program Lead for Innovate Beyond 5G https://5g-to-xg.org. His research interests include fundamental design and evaluation of wireless communication and sensor network systems spanning a diversity of technologies and application areas: next-gen (5G & beyond) wireless LANs and cellular networks, heterogeneous network coexistence, spectrum sharing, software defined radio platforms, vehicular and sensor networking. He spent 2001-03 on academic leave at Intel Wireless Technology Lab as a Senior Researcher engaged in systems architecture and standards development for ultra-wideband systems (Wireless PANs) and next generation high-speed wireless LANs. During Jan-July 2008, he was Science Foundation of Ireland’s E.T.S. Walton Awardee for a sabbatical at University College, Dublin and also recipient of a Royal Acad. Engineering (UK) Distinguished Visiting Fellowship during summer 2011. He has served as IEEE Communications Society (ComSoc) Distinguished Lecturer and as Associate Editor for all the major ComSoc journals. He served 2 terms as (elected) member of Executive Committee, National Spectrum Consortium dedicated to efficient spectrum sharing between Federal and commercial networks and is the co-author of IEEE TAES 2016 Best paper award for work on Radar-Comm coexistence. He was elevated to IEEE Fellow by Communications Society in 2007 for ``contributions to multi-user communications theory and cross-layer design of wireless networking standards”.

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Kevin Qipeng Liu will present his FPO "Cryptography in the Age of Quantum Computers 2.0" on Tuesday, July 27, 2021 at 4PM via Zoom.
by jfarquer＠cs.princeton.edu 22 Jul '21

22 Jul '21

Kevin Qipeng Liu will present his FPO "Cryptography in the Age of Quantum Computers 2.0" on Tuesday, July 27, 2021 at 4PM via Zoom. Zoom link: https://princeton.zoom.us/j/6541841088 The members of Kevin's committee are as follows: Mark Zhandry (Adviser); Readers: Ran Raz and Gillat Kol; Examiners: Mark Braverman, Matthew Weinberg and Mark Zhandry. A copy of his thesis is available upon request. Please email gradinfo(a)cs.princeton.edu <mailto:gradinfo@cs.princeton.edu> if you would like a copy of the thesis. Everyone is invited to attend his talk. Abstract follows below: People widely believe that full-scale quantum computers will eventually be viable in the near future. Quantum computers pose threats to many existing cryptosystems (most prominently, Shor's algorithm) while raising the possibility of using quantum[1]mechanical phenomena to achieve never-before-possible capabilities. First, I will present my work on quantum query complexity: I will show tight bounds for multi-collision finding problems and tight time-space tradeoffs for function inversion problems. The latter indicates that Grover's search cannot be sped up even with a piece of preprocessed quantum advice. This technique can be extended to prove the post-quantum non-uniform security of many existing cryptographic schemes. Second, I will present my work on post-quantum zero-knowledge proof. I will start by showing that post-quantum constant-round zero-knowledge protocols for NP with black-box simulators do not exist in the plain model unless NP is in BQP. Then, I will show how to achieve non-interactive zero-knowledge in the quantum random oracle model by proving that the famous Fiat-Shamir transformation is secure. Third, I will present my work on quantum copy-protection, which aims to use the unclonability of quantum states to achieve programs that cannot be copied. Towards this goal, I will show that any unlearnable function can be copy-protected relative to classical oracles. For specific cryptographic functionalities (such as signatures and RPFs), I will show that they can be copy-protected in the plain model.

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