Publications
What would it feel like to run outside, right now, and attempt a somersault on the first surface you find? Taking seriously an invitation like this to imagine a (perhaps unlikely) future, prompts the activation of evolutionary machinery in the mind and body that took millions of years to emerge. The ability to answer this question depends upon a surprisingly complex model of yourself, the...
We formalize a notion of a privacy wrapper, defined as an algorithm that can take an arbitrary and untrusted script and produce an output with differential privacy guarantees. Our novel privacy wrapper, named TAHOE, incorporates two design ideas: a type of stability under subsetting, and randomization over subset size. We show that TAHOE imposes differential privacy for every possible script....
The sudden unexpected rise in monkeypox cases worldwide has become an increasing concern. The zoonotic disease characterized by smallpox-like symptoms has already spread to nearly twenty countries and several continents and is labeled a potential pandemic by experts. monkeypox infections do not have specific treatments. However, since smallpox viruses are similar to monkeypox viruses...
Human errors in criminal investigations have previously led to devastating miscarriages of justice. For example, flaws in forensic identification based on physical or photographic evidence are notoriously unreliable. The criminal justice system has, therefore, started to turn to artificial intelligence (AI) to improve the reliability and fairness of forensic identification. So as not to repeat...
Due to data collection, there is a potential risk concerning security and privacy, so IoT reliability and survivability are of utmost concern. In this paper, we address the concern using two methods. The first method is device identification, which uses an extensive set of machine learning algorithms for identifying IoT devices. The algorithms include Logistic Regression, K- Nearest Neighbour...
The Internet of Things (IoT) is connecting more devices every day. Security is critical to ensure that the devices operate in a trusted environment. The lack of proper IoT security encourages cybercriminals to target many smart devices across the network and gain sensitive information. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are common in the IoT infrastructure and involve hijacking IoT...
Over the last few decades, the expansion of technology and the internet has led to the number of users proliferating on social media, with a simultaneous increase in hate speech. A critical concern is, hate speech is not only responsible for igniting violence and spreading hatred, but its detection also requires a considerable amount of computing resources and content monitoring by human...
When does web search work? There is a significant amount of research showing where and how web search seems to fail. Researchers identify various contributing causes of web search breakdowns: the for-profit orientation of advertising driven companies, racial capitalism, the agonistic playing field with search engine optimizers and others trying to game the algorithm, or perhaps ‘user error’....
This dissertation explores how machine learning and artificial intelligence can be applied within music composition and production. My approach in this research stems from an underlying perspective that these technologies are deeply intertwined with the people who use them or are affected by them: we can’t hope to understand one side of the picture without looking at the other. From this...
In early 2017, a journalist and search engine expert wrote about “Google’s biggest ever search quality crisis.” Months later, Google hired him as the first Google “Search Liaison” (GSL). By October 2021, when someone posted to Twitter a screenshot of misleading Google Search results for “had a seizure now what,” users tagged the Twitter account of the GSL in reply. The GSL frequently publicly...
Google Scholar has become an important player in the scholarly economy. Whereas typical academic publishers sell bibliometrics, analytics and ranking products, Alphabet, through Google Scholar, provides “free” tools for academic search and scholarly evaluation that have made it central to academic practice. Leveraging political imperatives for open access publishing, Google Scholar has managed...
The IoT network is expected to harbor several zettabytes of information in the future. Since trust and integrity are critical to IoT, it is essential to imbibe trust into the IoT environment for ensuring dependability and reliability. We propose a machine learning-based trustworthy system for the IoT-based smart home environment. Multiple appliances connected through the internet are...
The emergence of trust and solidarity is arguably foundational for economic development and social order. Yet many studies, often survey-based, document large disparities in general trust and social cohesion between countries. Can mutual trust and solidarity arise between people even in areas of low general trust, or do national cultural contexts block such connections? We report an...