U.Va. Computer Scientists Reach Finals of $4M Cybersecurity Competition

Congratulations to the Department of Computer Science’s Michele Co, Prof. Jack Davidson, Anh Nguyen-Tuong and Jason Hiser! They are one of seven finalist teams that will compete in a $4 million cyber security competition sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which looks for breakthrough technologies that can be used in national defense. The final competition will be held in August 2016 in Las Vegas, in conjunction with DEF CON, the world’s largest annual hacker convention.

Read the full article from UVA Today here.

abhi shelat receives Google Research Award

abhi shelat and Muthuramakrishnan Venkitasubramaniam (U. Rochester) receive Google Research Award

Congratulations to abhi shelat, and his colleague Muthuramakrishnan Venkitasubramaniam from U. Rochester. Google received 808 proposals and funded 122. 

Title: Fast Secure Computation via Divide and Conquer

Secure two-party computation for any function f() allows for mutually distrustful parties to collaborate and compute f() jointly while leaking as little information as possible on their private inputs. Recent work consisting of protocol improvements and implementation insights illustrates the approaching practicality of this technology. This proposal suggests an novel direction to designing secure computation protocols that is inspired by the algorithmic technique of divide-and-conquer.

abhi’s is not the only U.Va. proposal to be funded! Denis Nekipelov (Econ, with a courtesy appointment in CS) also won an award! Denis’s proposal — which has a significant CS dimension — was joint with Eva Tardos from Cornell.

Title: Econometric inference and algorithmic learning in games

With auctions having emerged as main source of revenue on the Internet, there are multitudes of interesting data sets for user behavior in Internet auctions. Classical analysis of game outcomes relied on the notion of Bayes Nash equilibrium in multiple ways, both in analysing outcomes, and inferring the user’s types or valuations from the observed data. However, the assumption that these data are generated by the equilibrium behavior of the players is often unrealistic. The main challenge considered in this proposal is the dynamic nature of the online environ- ment. The focus of the proposed project is on developing a methodology for inference in games without relying on the standard notions of the stability of outcomes. Typical games describing on- line environments, including the Internet auctions, are best thought of as repeated games, where participation and the strategies of agents evolve over time. The main goal of the proposed work is to develop a theory for game outcomes in such an environment, and understand how to infer from the observed data the player’s valuations and their strategies in learning how to play the game.

Engineering School Partners with Micron on Groundbreaking Processor

A Worldwide Center For Advanced Processing Research

Professors Mircea Stan, Kevin Skadron and Stuart Wolf are heading the Center for Automata Processing, the only center of its kind in the world.

 

Micron Technology finds itself in an unusual position for a company known for innovations in computer memory and storage. It has entered new territory by developing a processing chip capable of opening the door to advances in fields like bioinformatics, video/image analytics and network security. It turned last year to computer scientists at the University of Virginia with expertise in novel processor architectures and relevant applications to build a worldwide community devoted to realizing the Automata Processor’s potential. The Center for Automata Processing, cofounded by Micron and the University, is a virtual collaboration of universities, companies and government agencies.

Read the full article here