📣 The first seminar of the Trustworthy AI Seminars will be given by Peter Kairouz on "Context Matters: A New Paradigm for Differentially Private Synthetic Text Generation."
🕰️ Friday, March 6, at 9am PT / 12pm ET / 5pm UK time
🌎 Details, Zoom link, YouTube stream, etc. at trust-ai-sem.github.io
Hey everyone, @ebagdasa.bsky.social and I are rebooting and widening the old prisec-ml seminar series. Give us a follow at @trust-ai-sem.bsky.social and check out our website at: trust-ai-sem.github.io
We already have a couple of amazing speakers booked!
Doesn’t really instill a lot of confidence in the process :) but happy to help with anything privacy related
I’m excited to share that the UCR's LOGOS Interest Group is hosting an Open Day on February 27.
If you’re a Southern California–based researcher and you’re interested in research problems in cybesafety/computation social science, get in touch!
👉 Event page: logos.cs.ucr.edu/open-day.html
MAGA level copium!
Unapologetically wouldn't consider living anywhere in the US other than California.
You can get here with a 16 min train ride from Union station and a 10 min uber
PSA if you’re ever in the LA area, don’t miss Raffis place in Glendale. Worth the detour just for their khoobideh. Wow.
Just when you didn’t think this week could get better!
UC, 2024: Your health insurance is going up significantly because we cover GLP-1, so go and hate people on it
UC 2025: We are no longer covering GLP-1 unless your BMI is above 40 (if you're 5'10", you'd need to weigh >280 lbs)
Also UC, 2025: Your health insurance is going up because GLP-1
Wut?
Congrats to Sundar -- his paper "To Shuffle or not to Shuffle: Auditing DP-SGD with Shuffling" was just accepted to #NDSS2026!
Only 21 out of 950 straight accepts this round 😳
Joint work with Borja Balle, Jamie Hayes, & @emilianodc.com
Pre-print: arxiv.org/abs/2411.10614
Hey folks! My Fall quarter class (OS capstone project) has been canceled, which means I'm on an impromptu short sabbatical until Xmas.
I'm happy to travel a bit to visit and give talks if anyone is interested!
I'm aware that I'm known as a hater, but can someone explain to me why on earth anyone would willingly use Overleaf to work on papers?
The only use cases that I can think of are:
1) emergency editing from someone else's device or iPad
2) non-CS co-authors not familiar with LaTeX
You can keep in and out. Californians are happy to get rid of them.
Ever struggled with managing your pubs to create an NSF BioSketch using MyNCBI's My Bibliography? I think I have finally found a decent way to handle stuff, sharing in case it helps... (Step 5 is the one that took me the longest!)
www.linkedin.com/posts/activi...
Work led by my student Georgi Ganev, with Meenatchi Sundaram Muthu Selva Annamalai and Sofiane Mahiou. See you in Taiwan!
arxiv.org/abs/2504.06923
4/ We introduce a new bin selection method and demonstrate that DP-aware domain extraction significantly reduces privacy leakage
5/ We once again stress the importance of privatizing preprocessing in DP pipelines.
Highlights:
1/ We evaluate four discretization strategies across different models and datasets
2/ Optimizing the choice of discretizer and number of bins can improve utility by almost 50%
3/ Failing to privatize the discretization step can severely compromise privacy.
📣 Upcoming CCS'25 paper 📣
The Importance of Being Discrete: Measuring the Impact of Discretization in End-to-End Differentially Private Synthetic Data
We investigate the critical yet overlooked role of discretization in end-to-end differentially private (DP) tabular synthetic data generation
Conditional congrats to Georgi and Sundar - their paper on Discretization in DP Synthetic Data was accepted with shepherding to CCS’25.
Very important work on an overlooked aspect of end-to-end DP pipelines.
Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2504.06923 -- feedback welcome!
Bonus highlight: In at least one case, a broker leaked another person’s sensitive info, including a driver’s license number.
Really interesting work on CCPA-mandated compliance of data brokers with access/deletion requests: arxiv.org/abs/2506.21914
Highlights:
- Almost half of the brokers don't respond
- Only <5% of brokers provided personal data
- No standard/easy way to submit requests
- Requests for even more PII
TIL my Internet provider (Cox Communications) creates an access point ("CoxWiFi") from your WiFi router where other Cox customers can connect to at no charge. This was enabled by default and without my explicit consent. How is that legal?
Yeah I've been getting emails from HS students and taken a few of them to do small projects. Skills and time varies but overall I don't have any expectations that we'll have a publishable paper and I try to come up with projects that match both their interest and their skills.
Online abuse self-defense training for scientists "who appear in media and other public outlets, as well as their allies and employers" www.sciline.org/learn/online...
Once in a while, I stumble upon an old email of mine — the writing and grammar are awful. I used to feel embarrassed, riddled with imposter syndrome, etc.
But for the last couple of years, I’ve focused instead on how much I’ve improved.
Cognitive restructuring is such an underrated power…
Unlike traditional finances, all someone needs to access all your crypto is your passwords and they can steal your money and disappear without a trace. This incentivizes some horrific behavior all over the world.
Hi Everyone, I'm teaching a new UG class on privacy at UCR and I'm planning a lecture on human factors of privacy.
Has anyone taught anything on this topic and would like to share notes/topics covered? I'd be super grateful!
