LATEST ARTICLES

How to make dull information exciting

by Philip Yaffe

Each "Communication Corner" essay is self-contained; however, they build on each other. For best results, before reading this essay and doing the exercise, go to the first essay "How an Ugly Duckling Became a Swan," then read each succeeding essay.

In this installment, Philip Yaffe explains how to give the reader what they want.

P2P networks are inherently unstable

by Ted G. Lewis

The P2P technology underlying file-sharing systems like Gnutella and distributed autonomous organizations like blockchain are inherently unstable because of self-organizing processes akin to Gause's competitive exclusion principle, and preferential attachment. To maintain an egalitarian P2P organization it is necessary to conserve the original network's entropy, defined as the random structure of the network and actions among peers.

When Good Machine Learning Leads to Bad Security: Big Data (Ubiquity symposium)

May 2018
by Tegjyot Singh Sethi, Mehmed Kantardzic

While machine learning has proven to be promising in several application domains, our understanding of its behavior and limitations is still in its nascent stages. One such domain is that of cybersecurity, where machine learning models are replacing traditional rule based systems, owing to their ability to generalize and deal with large scale attacks which are not seen before. However, the naive transfer of machine learning principles to the domain of security needs to be taken with caution. Machine learning was not designed with security in mind and as such is prone to adversarial manipulation and reverse engineering. While most data based learning models rely on a static assumption of the world, the security landscape is one that is especially dynamic, with an ongoing never ending arms race between the system designer and the attackers. Any solution designed for such a domain needs to take into account an active adversary and needs to evolve over time, in the face of emerging threats. We term this as the "Dynamic Adversarial Mining" problem, and this paper provides motivation and foundation for this new interdisciplinary area of research, at the crossroads of machine learning, cybersecurity, and streaming data mining.

First write like you speak, then write like you write

April 2018
by Philip Yaffe

Each "Communication Corner" essay is self-contained; however, they build on each other. For best results, before reading this essay and doing the exercise, go to the first essay "How an Ugly Duckling Became a Swan," then read each succeeding essay.

In this installment, Philip Yaffe introduces a two-step plan to create well-written text that will not only impress the reader, but also engage the reader to digest and comprehend new ideas or concepts with ease.