Spring 2018

This seminar covers various topics related to vulnerability analysis and hacking. A deep understanding of the details of both the vulnerabilities that make security compromises possible and the countermeasures that are required to detect and block the attacks is a necessary prerequisite to address the ever-changing set of security issues that affect applications, operating systems, and networks. The seminar has a practical emphasis, and it is geared towards learning new tools and techniques in a group setting.

This seminar introduces deep reinforcement learning with a focus on understanding how the modern algorithms work and how to implement them. We will also compare reinforcement learning to evolution strategies, supervised learning, and optimal control to better understand when reinforcement learning is appropriate.

This quarter we will tackle the broad topic of dynamical networks, including the theoretical and empirical analysis, modeling and control, of these networks. This topic spans many different domains (social networks, animal migration networks, robotic networks, epidemic networks, etc.). Seminar participants will be asked to present and discuss the findings of a relevant paper. They may choose from a list provided, or select another paper.

This is a graduate-level course on deep learning for text analysis.  We will discuss newest publications on information extraction, knowledge graph construction,  question answering and dialog system. Each student is expected to give one hour presentation and complete a research project.

Cryptography provides techniques, mechanisms, and tools for private and authenticated communication, and for performing secure and authenticated transactions over the Internet as well as other open networks. It is highly probable that every single bit of information flowing through our networks will have to be either encrypted and decrypted or signed and authenticated in a few years from now. This infrastructure is needed to carry over the legal and contractual certainty from our paper-based offices to our virtual offices existing in the cyberspace.