Joint MURI-AUSMURI in Cybersecurity Assurance for Teams of Computers and Humans

7 CATCH papers at NeurIPS 2023

2023-09-26T01:50:00+00:00

CATCH Principal Investigators and researchers have had 7 full papers accepted to NeurIPS 2023, the premier venue for machine learning research, internationally. Congrats to all involved!

Our researchers are grateful to the support of ARO, DSTG/DISR, and the CATCH program managers.

The papers’ authors are keen for feedback from the community. Interested researchers are most welcome to attend the corresponding talks/visit posters at NeurIPS in New Orleans in December 2023, or reach out by email.

Neurips 2023 CATCH papers

Mechanism design for collaborative normal mean estimation. Yiding Chen, Xiaojin Zhu, and Kirthevasan Kandasamy. Spotlight.
Grounding Neural Inference with Satisfiability Modulo Theories. Matt Fredrikson, Kaiji Lu, Somesh Jha, Saranya Vijayakumar, Vijay Ganesh, Zifan Wang. Spotlight.
RS-Del: Edit distance robustness certificates for sequence classifiers via randomized deletion. Zhuoqun Huang, Neil G. Marchant, Keane Lucas, Lujo Bauer, Olga Ohrimenko, and Benjamin I. P. Rubinstein.
Scaling in Depth: Unlocking Robustness Certification on ImageNet. Kai Hu, Andy Zou, Zifan Wang, Klas Leino, Matt Fredrikson.
Dream the impossible: Outlier imagination with diffusion models. Xuefeng Du, Yiyou Sun, Xiaojin Zhu, and Yixuan Li.
Doubly Robust Peer-To-Peer Learning Protocol Nicholas Franzese, Adam Dziedzic, Christopher A. Choquette-Choo, Mark R. Thomas, Muhammad Ahmad Kaleem, Stephan Rabanser, Congyu Fang, Somesh Jha, Nicolas Papernot, Xiao Wang.
Agnostic Multi-group Active Learning Nicholas Rittler and Kamalika Chaudhuri.

Workshop at UC San Diego

2023-07-01T01:50:00+00:00

CATCH MURI’s fourth all-hands meeting, marking the end of Year 2, was a June 2023 workshop held at the UC San Diego node of CATCH, in the beautiful Franklin Antonio Hall.

The two-day workshop ended with a full morning of student presentations, highlighting some of the best work of the project. Attendees toured parts of the UCSD campus and enjoyed a group dinner, generously hosted by UCSD.

Joint double MURI workshop at UC Riverside

2022-12-01T01:50:00+00:00

CATCH MURI’s third all-hands meeting was a joint workshop with the MURI on Autonomy in Cyberspace through rObot learning and Man-BOt Teaming. As sister MURIs, AutoCoMBOT and CATCH were both funded by ARO in the same topic-year.

The November 2022 meeting was generously hosted by Prof Heng Yin at UC Riverside. Heng was also General Chair of CCS 2022, attended by several MURI and AUSMURI researchers right before the joint meeting, in nearby Los Angeles.

The joint meeting was an excellent opportunity for researchers from the two MURIs and AUSMURI to network and share ideas across many areas of mutual interest. With ARO PM Cliff Wang moving to NSF, we thanked Cliff for his fantastic support and guidance, and welcomed Paul Yu who has joined MaryAnne Fields in the ARO PM team.

Google recognition for CATCH privacy research

2022-06-01T01:50:00+00:00

CATCH researchers PI Olya Ohrimenko, PhD student Jiankai Jin and PI Ben Rubinstein have presented their work on systems implementation flaws in differential privacy, last week at the prestigious 2022 IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy (also known as ‘Oakland’) in San Francisco. Demonstrating new flaws in floating-point rounding and timing side-channel attacks, found in industry-standard implementations by Google and Facebook/Meta, the work was recognized by an Honorable Mention in Google’s Bug Hunter program due to its impact on the Google Differential Privacy library. The work also resulted in a patch to Facebook/Meta’s Opacus library for privacy-preserving deep learning.

First year Sydney review workshop

2022-05-26T01:50:00+00:00

Our first MURI-AUSMURI annual Review and Research progress workshop was a great success!

Truly amazing research talks and discussions addressing Human Behaviour, Psychology research, Robustness of AI and all the ongoing research is a testament to the talent and dedication of everyone involved.

Our project on Cybersecurity Assurance for Teams of Computers and Humans (CATCH) convenes researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Carnegie Mellon University, UC San Diego, Penn State University, University of Melbourne, Macquarie University, and University of Newcastle. It was an absolute pleasure to spend 2 days with academic faculty, postdocs, and students from these institutions as well as partners from US Army Research Office, the U.S. Office of the Secretary of Defense, and Australia’s Defence Science and Technology (DST).

We were honoured to host Dr Bindu Nair, Director of Basic Research, U.S. Department of Defense, and hear her perspectives on national cooperation, basic research, and advice for successful MURIs.

What a great kick off to a future of continued success and collaboration!

Postdoc Opening at Macquarie University

2021-11-28T01:50:00+00:00

A 3-year postdoc position is open at Macquarie University’s Cyber Security Hub in Sydney Australia.

Application deadline: Dec 5, 2021 (Australian Eastern Standard Time)

Position details and application: https://mq.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/CareersatMQ/job/North-Ryde-Campus/Postdoctoral-Research-Fellow_R000003459-1

Join a world-class team across 7 universities in Australia and the US on the Joint MURI-AUSMURI in Cybersecurity Assurance for Teams of Computers and Humans

The two PIs at Macquarie are Dali Kaafar and Shlomo Berkovsky.

CATCH kick-off

2021-09-30T01:50:00+00:00

A group of 40 researchers, Government and Defense partners met virtually over two days Sep 28–29 to share the latest research spanning all areas of the Joint MURI-AUSMURI in Cybersecurity Assurance for Teams of Computers and Humans.

This CATCH MURI kick-off was just the first of many collaborative meetings within the team of computer and psychological scientists who are developing the frontier of robust human-AI teams for cybersecurity.

Postdoc Opening at the University of Newcastle

2021-09-21T01:50:00+00:00

A postdoc position is open at the Newcastle Cognition Lab, at the University of Newcastle, Australia.

Application deadline: Oct 5, 2021 (Australian Eastern Standard Time)

Position details and application: https://www.psychonomic.org/networking/apply_now.aspx?view=2&id=675916

Join a world-class team across 7 universities in Australia and the US on the Joint MURI-AUSMURI in Cybersecurity Assurance for Teams of Computers and Humans

The two PIs at Newcastle are Scott Brown and Ami Eidels.

PI Toby Murray Eureka Prize Finalist

2021-09-02T17:55:23+00:00

Congratulations to CATCH PI Toby Murray, Robert Sison (both at the University of Melbourne) and Mark Beaumont (DSTG) who’s team has been selected as a finalist for the prestigious 2021 Australian Museum Eureka Outstanding Science in Safeguarding Australia Prize. This recognition highlights their work on the Cross Domain Desktop Compositor.

The CDDC, which was developed by the team with CSIRO and UNSW prior to CATCH, combines secure hardware with secure hardware with secure operating system seL4 to provide an alternative to insecure KVM switches for accessing multiple networks conveniently and securely from the same desktop experience.

Postdoc Opening at the University of Melbourne

2021-07-27T13:55:23+00:00

A postdoctoral research fellow in security, machine learning, or HCI is open at the University of Melbourne’s School of Computing and Information Systems.

Application deadline: Sep 19, 2021 (Australian Eastern Standard Time)

Position details and application: http://go.unimelb.edu.au/5soi

Join a world-class team across 7 universities in Australia and the US on the Joint MURI-AUSMURI in Cybersecurity Assurance for Teams of Computers and Humans

The four PIs at Melbourne you would work with depending on your area of expertise are Olya Ohrimenko, Toby Murray, Vas Kostakos, Ben Rubinstein.