Colloquium

The IDC CS Colloquium
 

Ran Cohen - Reaching Agreement Without Saying Much: Byzantine Agreement With Polylog Bits Per Party

Byzantine agreement (BA), the task of n parties to agree on one of their input bits in the face of malicious agents, is a powerful primitive that lies at the core of a vast range of distributed protocols. Interestingly, in protocols with the best overall communication, the demands of the parties are highly unbalanced: the amortized cost is polylog(n) bits per party, but some parties must send \Omega(n) bits.

28/04/2022 - 13:30

Shimon Shocken - From Xor to Doom: Pegasus Exposed

Pegasus is a zero-click attack: The target is sent a text message, and that's it – the device is compromised – the message doesn't even have to be read. According to a recent Google report: "Short of not using the device, there is no way to prevent exploitation... Pegasus is a weapon against which there is no defense... This is one of the most technically sophisticated exploits we've ever seen".

24/03/2022 - 13:30

Aviv Yehezkel: Network Anomaly Detection Using Transfer Learning Based on Auto-Encoders Loss Normalization

Anomaly detection in computer networks is a classic, long-term research problem. Previous attempts to solve it have used auto-encoders to learn a representation of the normal behaviour of networks and detect anomalies according to reconstruction loss. In this talk, I'll present the concept of "auto-encoder losses transfer learning".

10/03/2022 - 13:30

Guy Gaziv - Mind Reading: Decoding Visual Experience from Brain Activity

Reconstructing and semantically classifying observed natural images from novel (unknown) fMRI brain recordings is a milestone for developing brain-machine interfaces and for the study of consciousness. Unfortunately, acquiring sufficient “paired” training examples (images with their corresponding fMRI recordings) to span the huge space of natural images and their semantic classes is prohibitive, even in the largest image-fMRI datasets.

11/11/2021 - 13:30

Shimon Schocken - Nand to Tetris: Applied Computer Science From the Ground Up

I'll present an educational approach that synthesizes many abstractions, algorithms, and data structures learned in key CS courses, and makes them concrete by building a complete computer system – hardware and software – from the ground up. The methodology is based on guiding students through a set of 12 hands-on projects that gradually construct and unit-test a simple hardware platform and a modern software hierarchy, yielding a surprisingly powerful computer system.

04/11/2021 - 13:30