Image
null
CSAIL article

As a theoretical cryptographer, Kalai deals with questions like: how do you prove you know something without revealing what it is? What does it mean to know something at all? How can we verify AI answers are good, not just correct? And, in a world increasingly run by systems we don't fully understand, what do we owe each other in the name of safety? 

Stata Center exterior

American Family Insurance, CSAIL Alliances Affiliate, exists to protect what matters most to households and businesses across the country, using data science and applied AI.

 

CSAIL students

Tesla, CSAIL Alliances members, develops and deploys autonomy at scale in vehicles, robots and more.

Tesla believes that an approach based on advanced AI for vision and planning, supported by efficient use of inference hardware, is the only way to achieve a general solution for full self-driving, bi-pedal robotics and beyond.

 

Join this engaging Tech Talk with CSAIL Alliances

 

Image
There is a brief moment between a chip’s prediction machinery being wiped or isolated and when it uses its predictions. Malicious actors can time an attack to exploit this small window, which could reveal sensitive data (Credit: Gabriel Maragaño).
CSAIL article

Modern processors are fast in part because they guess. Rather than waiting to find out which way a program will branch, a chip predicts the likely path and races ahead. When the guess is right, time is saved. When it's wrong, the work is discarded, but traces of it linger, and since the Spectre vulnerability was disclosed in 2018, attackers have known how to read those traces to pull secrets out of memory they should never see.

Stata Center exterior

Join BAM for an engaging TechTalk intended for a PhD audience, followed by networking. More details coming soon!

 

12-1PM: Talk

1-1:30PM: Networking 

Image
"It's like a microscope," says Joseph Ravichandran, the MIT PhD student who led the project. "If you've got a hand magnifying glass, you can see a little bit. But if you had an electron microscope, now we're really talking. That's what Fractal is. The electron microscope of operating systems” (Credit: Gabriel Maragaño).
CSAIL article

When security researchers want to understand what a modern processor is really doing with the kind of detail that determines whether attacks like Spectre and Meltdown are possible, they usually run their experiments on top of an operating system that was never built for the job. They open up macOS or Linux, patch the kernel by hand, and hope the modifications hold. The approach is unstable, hard to reproduce, and on Apple's platforms, slated for deprecation.

Image
Irene Tenison, Lalana Kagal and Anna Murphy of the Decentralized Information Group (DIG) developed a new method that could bring more accurate and efficient AI models to high-stakes applications like health care and finance (Credits:Credit: Adam Glanzman).
CSAIL article

A new method developed by MIT researchers can accelerate a privacy-preserving artificial intelligence training method by about 81 percent. This advance could enable a wider array of resource-constrained edge devices, like sensors and smartwatches, to deploy more accurate AI models while keeping user data secure.