Human-Centered AI

In "2001: a Space Odyssey," the astronaut falls into an monolith floating in space. Just before the radio cuts transmission to earth, the astronaut gasps, "my god, it's full of stars." This sense of wonder and impending revelation is the view I brought to my PhD studies in artifical intelligence. Surely, I thought, we were working together to unwind our own little piece of the great mysteries of the universe. I was quickly disabused of my higher notions. In falling into the mysteries of intelligence, I came to understand that the intelligence we were collectively working to build resembeled the mysterious power of the Space Odyssey monolith in more than one way, only as I fell into my research I muttered, "my god, it's full of bugs."

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Color Selection "Game"

The Priv.ly Project's anti-spoofing glyph

When you visit a website that looks like your bank's, how do you know that you are actually talking to your bank and not a scammer impersonating your bank? Typically you will look at the address bar of the browser and compare it to the address you remember from the …

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Compromising Combination Bike Locks

A Gigantic Bike lock in Burlington Vermont

A hazard of working in computer security is you see the world through a security-focused lens. Suddenly, mundane tasks transform into interesting intellectual challenges: "That card shuffle did not consume enough entropy!"..."Posting this online will open me up to social engineering!"..."People can learn my bike lock combination through …

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