Events

# The Taub Faculty of Computer Science Events and Talks

Multi A(ge)nt Systems on Graphs
Michael Amir
Sunday, 02.10.2022, 11:30
Zoom Lecture: 3603849038
Multi-agent systems are a fascinating, multidisciplinary field with applications to robotics, distributed systems, biology, and social dynamics. A multi-agent system is a distributed system composed of several interacting, autonomous agents that cooperate to achieve some desired behavior. The topic of this talk is the way in which local interactions between extremely simple agents can result in desirable global states. We study this topic from two perspectives: the perspective of ...

Geometry-based Dynamic Connectivity Analysis of Biological Neural Networks
Avigail Cohen-Rimon
Wednesday, 28.09.2022, 11:00
Zoom Lecture: 96390522948
Learning in organisms is one of their most fundamental but intricate processes. Understanding learning is a longstanding problem in neuroscience as well as in artificial neural networks. In this work, we focus on studying in biological networks during motor learning through the lens of the connectivity of neurons in the primary motor cortex (M1). For this purpose, we analyze the neural activity recorded from awake and behaving mice using two-photon calcium imaging. These imaging m...

Generalizing Reinforcement Learning Agents with Abstract Contextual Embeddings
Guy Azran
Wednesday, 21.09.2022, 10:30
Zoom Lecture: 99606696165
Classic reinforcement learning methods such as Q-learning and policy gradient methods have seen great success in learning to perform a plethora of common tasks in AI, from playing video games to controlling self-driving vehicles and beyond. As a result, these methods and their extensions have become standard in most reinforcement learning settings. However, they have trouble adapting to changes in the environment. We believe this issue can be solved by giving the agent awareness o...

Succinct Interactive Oracle Proofs
Shafik Nassar
Monday, 12.09.2022, 14:00
Zoom Lecture: 3915434332 and Taub 601
\textit{Interactive Oracle Proofs} (IOPs) are a new type of proof-system that combines key properties of interactive proofs and PCPs: IOPs enable a verifier to be convinced of the correctness of a statement by interacting with an untrusted prover while reading just a few bits of the messages sent by the prover. IOPs have become very prominent in the design of efficient proof-systems in recent years. In this work we study \textit{succinct IOPs}, which are IOPs in which the comm...

On The Structure Of Heilbronn’s Configurations
Antoine Vinciguerra
Thursday, 08.09.2022, 13:30
Zoom Lecture: 96677350253
Heilbronn's triangle problem asks how to place n points in the unit square, such that the smallest of the $\binom{n]{ 3}$ triangles is maximized. This problem, which was opened in the 1950s by the mathematician Heilbronn, has not yet been answered for n>8. Calling H)n( the area of the smallest triangle of the best set of n points, no tight bounds on it have been found so far. The best upper and lower bounds are $O(n^{-\mu+\epsilon})$, where $\mu=\frac{8}{7}$ , and $\Omega(\frac{\... Interpreting Embedding Spaces by Conceptualization Adi Simhi Thursday, 08.09.2022, 11:00 Zoom Lecture: 99807656912 One of the main methods for semantic interpretation of text is mapping it into a vector in some embedding space. Such vectors can then be used for a variety of textual processing tasks. Recently, most embedding spaces are a product of training large language models. One major drawback of this type of representation is their incomprehensibility to humans. Understanding the embedding space is crucial for several important needs, including the need to explain the decision of a sys... A Framework for Clinical Classification of Multivariate Time Series using Koopman Operators Yakir Yehuda Sunday, 04.09.2022, 11:00 Zoom Lecture: 2488049770 Clinical multivariate time series (MTS) arising from sensor data, such as EEG and ECG, is used in a variety of tasks. The sensors are composed of multiple leads connected to the body, where each lead generates a time series of data. Combining information from the different leads allows inference of cardiac activity from ECG (arrhythmia, acute coronary syndrome) or brain dysfunction from EEG (brain tumors, strokes, epilepsy). We present a framework for clinical classific... Graph Neural Networks Pretraining Through Inherent Supervision for Molecular Property Prediction Roy Benjamin Sunday, 28.08.2022, 11:00 Zoom Lecture: 96304969082 Recent global events have emphasized the importance of accelerating the drug discovery process. This process may take more than a decade and its overall cost might exceed one billion dollars. A way to deal with these issues is to use machine learning to increase the rate at which drugs are made available to the public while reducing the cost of the entire process. However, chemical labeled data for real-world applications is extremely scarce making traditional approaches less effe... Fair Correlation Clustering In General Graphs Roded Zats Monday, 22.08.2022, 08:30 Zoom Lecture: 7795921179 We consider the family of Correlation Clustering optimization problems under fairness constraints. In Correlation Clustering we are given a graph whose every edge is labeled either with a$+$or a$-$, and the goal is to find a clustering that agrees the most with the labels:$+$edges within clusters and$-$edges across clusters. The notion of fairness implies that there is no over, or under, representation of vertices in the clustering: every vertex has a color and the distr... On the Orchestration of Advanced Cellular Networks Dor Harris Tuesday, 16.08.2022, 13:00 Zoom Lecture: 92767988833 In recent years network operators are experiencing changes in clients needs. Self-driving cars, augmented reality games and large scale data streaming are simple examples of new applications that require faster service with higher bandwidth availability to the clients. These changes force the network operators shift their business model and new network paradigms arise. The ongoing transition into 5G networks (and 6G networks that will soon arrive) is enabled in part by the comb... Extremal Properties of Polyominoes Gil Ben-Shachar Thursday, 11.08.2022, 13:00 Zoom Lecture: 93608083202 and Taub 601 Lattice animals are edge-connected sets of cells over various lattices. Some famous examples are polyominoes, polyhexes, polyiamonds and polycubes which are in the square, hexagonal triangular and cubical lattices respectively. Lattice animals have been studied extensively both as a combinatorial object, and as modeling tool in statistical physics. The two most significant problems related to lattice animals are the counting problem and the growth rate problem. The first is sim... Theory Seminar: Hardness of Approximation in P via Short Cycle Removal: Cycle Detection, Distance Oracles, and Beyond Seri Khoury (UC Berkeley) Wednesday, 10.08.2022, 12:30 Amado 814 Triangle finding is at the base of many conditional lower bounds in P, mainly for distance computation problems, and the existence of many$4$- or$5$-cycles in a worst-case instance had been the obstacle towards resolving major open questions. We present a new technique for efficiently removing almost all short cycles in a graph without unintentionally removing its triangles. Consequently, triangle finding problems do not become easy even in almost$k$-cycle free graphs, for a... FLOC 2022: The Eighth Federated Logic Conference Sunday, 31.07.2022, 09:00 Technion, Haifa FLOC 2022: The Eighth Federated Logic Conference (FLoC 2022,July 31-August 12, 2022, Haifa, Israel) Hosted by the Henry and Marilyn Taub Faculty of Computer Science at the Technion ABOUT FLOC During the past forty years there has been extensive, continuous, and growing interaction between logic and computer science. In many respects, logic provides computer science with both a unifying foundational framework and a tool for modeling. In fact, logic has been called “the cal... A Machine Learning Exploration of Relations between Protein Structures and their Genetic Coding Linor Ackerman-Schraier Tuesday, 26.07.2022, 10:30 Zoom Lecture: 7665101196 Synonymous codons translate into the same amino acid. Although the identity of synonymous codons is often considered inconsequential to the final protein structure there is mounting evidence for an association between the two. Protein structure plays an important role in understanding the biological function and mechanism of a protein therefore understanding the relations between protein structures and their genetic coding is crucial. Our study examined the association between the... CGGC Seminar: 3D Content Creation Made Fast and Easy Hsueh-Ti Derek Liu (University of Toronto) Sunday, 24.07.2022, 11:00 Room 337 Taub Bld. Creating digital 3D objects has been a central task across different disciplines and the key towards democratizing the metaverse. However, 3D content creation is still a privilege reserved for professional modelers because existing content creation tools are difficult to use by the general public. My research aims to lower the difficulty of 3D content creation to the point where everyone can manipulate digital 3D shapes. In this talk, I will first discuss how to build easy-to-use ... Topology-Controlled Reconstruction from Partial Planar Cross-Sections Amani Shhadi Thursday, 21.07.2022, 13:00 Zoom Lecture: 9336114415 and Taub 301 The problem of three-dimensional reconstruction from planar cross-sections arises in many fields, such as biomedical image analysis, and geographical information systems. The problem has been studied extensively in the past~40 years. Each cross-section of the input contains multiple contours, where each contour divides the plane into different material types. The reconstructed three-dimensional object is a valid volume (surrounded by a closed surface) that interpolates the ... On Synthesis and Reconstruction of human Facial Photometry and Corresponding Geometry Ron Slossberg Tuesday, 19.07.2022, 13:00 Zoom Lecture: 99388657358 In this thesis, we study the modeling of human faces. As all structured data is believed to reside on some low-dimensional manifold in a high-dimensional space, we wish to study and model the so-called manifold of human faces. By uncovering the latent manifold of faces one can project onto the manifold (facial reconstruction) as well as sample from the manifold (facial synthesis), two tasks with a wide range of applications such as gaming, animation, and AR/VR to name a few. In... Concurrent Games with Multiple Topologies Shai Guendelman Thursday, 30.06.2022, 11:30 Zoom Lecture: 94035960574 Concurrent multi-player games with omega-regular objectives are a standard model for systems that consist of several interacting components, each with its own objective. The standard solution concept for such games is Nash Equilibrium (NE), which is a stable'' strategy profile for the players. In many settings, the system is not fully observable by the interacting components, e.g., due to internal variables. Then, the interaction is modelled by a partial information game. Unfort... Reliable Concurrent Computing Gali Sheffi Wednesday, 29.06.2022, 16:30 Zoom Lecture: 95272009519 The rapid deployment of multi-core architectures has resulted in a dire need for scalable and reliable concurrent algorithms. This dissertation focuses on the design of concurrent data structures, which constitute building blocks for concurrent algorithms. Two major design goals in this domain are reliability and efficiency. This talk will concentrate on the hardness of reclaiming concurrent data-structures' memory efficiently, while taking care to preserve reliability. It will in... Theory Seminar: APMF < APSP? Gomory-Hu Tree in Subcubic Time Amir Abboud (Weizmann Institute of Science) - CANCELLED! Wednesday, 29.06.2022, 12:30 Taub 201 The All-Pairs Max-Flow problem (APMF) asks to compute the maximum flow (or equivalently, the minimum cut) between all pairs of nodes in a graph. The naive solution of making n^2 calls to a (single-pair) max-flow algorithm was beaten in 1961 by a remarkable algorithm of Gomory and Hu that only makes n-1 calls. Within the same time bound, their algorithm also produces a cut-equivalent tree (a.k.a. GH-Tree) that preserves all pairwise minimum cuts exactly. This gives a cubic upper bo... Pixel Club: Graph Neural Networks through the Lens of Measure Theory Maxim Fishman (EE, Technion) Wednesday, 29.06.2022, 11:30 Zoom Lecture: 4108205267 Despite their growing popularity, graph neural networks (GNNs) still suffer from multiple unsolved problems, including lack of embedding expressiveness, propagation of information to distant nodes, and training on large-scale graphs. Understanding the roots of and providing solutions for such problems require developing analytic tools and techniques. In this talk we provide a measure theoretic point of view for the above-mentioned problems, and derive a notion of “recoverabilit... Deep Reinforcement Learning for 5G Dense Urban Wireless Routing Barak Gahtan Monday, 27.06.2022, 14:00 Zoom Lecture: 94134094787 We study the problem of routing real-time flows over a multi-hop mmWave mesh. We develop a model-free Deep Reinforcement Learning algorithm that determines which subset of the mmWave links should be activated during each time slot and using what power level. The proposed algorithm, called AARL (Adaptive Activator RL), can handle a variety of network topologies, packet loads and interference models. It does not require prior knowledge of the interdependence of different mmWave link... A New Lower Bound on the Growth Constant of Polycubes in Three Dimensions Matan Mamistvalov Monday, 27.06.2022, 13:30 Zoom Lecture: 98302771831 In this thesis, we deal the approximation problem of the growth rate of polycubes in three dimensions. We consider three-dimensional polycubes, which are finite collections of face-connected 3D-cubes, centered in points of$\mathbb{Z}^3$, where the lexicographically smallest cube is centered in$(0,0,0)$. If we denote the number of 3D polycubes comprised of$n$cubes by$A(n)$, then we know from prior results that this sequence behaves like an exponential, and so we denote its gro... Protocol Infernece from Program Executable Using Symbolic Execution and Automata Learning Ron Marcovich Sunday, 26.06.2022, 16:30 Zoom Lecture: 5088919659 Protocol Inference is the process of gaining information about a protocol from a binary code that implements it. This process is useful in cases such as extraction of the command and control protocol of a malware, uncovering security vulnerabilities in a network protocol implementation or verifying conformance to the protocol's standard. Protocol inference usually involves time-consuming work to manually reverse engineer the binary code. We present a novel method to automatical... Projects Fair on IoT, Android, Arduino and Networks Sunday, 26.06.2022, 14:00 CS Taub Lobby You are invited to the CS Taub projects fair for the Spring Semester of 2022, where 30 teams of undergraduate students will present and demonstrate projects in various fields in IoT, Android, Arduino and Networks, developed as part of the final project in the software engineering and communication networks track, most of which were carried out in collaboration with various social associations and organizations, and were intended to make a contribution to the community. The fai... Special Seminar: Efficient Detection of High Probability Cryptographic Properties of Large Boolean Functions via Surrogate Differentiation Prof. Adi Shamir (Weizmann Institute of Science) Thursday, 23.06.2022, 12:30 CS Taub Build. Auditorium 1 A central problem in cryptanalysis is to find all the significant deviations from randomness in a given$n$-bit cryptographic primitive. When$n$is large, the only practical way to find such statistical properties was to exploit the internal structure of the primitive and to speed up the search with a variety of heuristic rules of thumb. However, such bottom-up techniques can miss many properties, especially in cryptosystems which are designed to have hidden trapdoors. In this... Theory Seminar: Communication Complexity-based Lower Bounds for Proof Complexity of Natural Formulas Artur Ryazanov (St. Petersburg University) Wednesday, 22.06.2022, 12:30 Taub 201 A canonical communication problem Search(ϕ) is defined for every unsatisfiable CNF ϕ: an assignment to the variables of ϕ is distributed among the communicating parties, they are to find a clause of ϕ falsified by this assignment. Lower bounds on the randomized k-party communication complexity of Search(ϕ) in the number-on-forehead (NOF) model imply tree-size lower bounds, rank lower bounds, and size-space tradeoffs for the formula ϕ in the semantic proof system Tcc(k,c) tha... Pixel Club: CLIP as a Generative Foundation Model Amit Bermano (Tel-Aviv University) Tuesday, 21.06.2022, 11:30 Room 1061, EE Meyer Building Large scale Mega-models are impossible to train using standard hardware, but encompass a vast semantic understanding of our world. In this talk, I explore three ways to leverage the knowledge encompassed in the Recent Large scale"Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training" (CLIP) model, as a foundation to push the boundaries of generative capabilities: - InStyleGAN-NADA, we show how to adapt the StyleGAN generator across a multitudeof domains characterized by diverse styles and s... CGGC Seminar: Application-Driven Geometric Machine Learning Prof. Justin Solomon (MIT) Monday, 20.06.2022, 12:30 Taub 401 From 3D modeling to autonomous driving, a variety of applications can benefit from data-driven reasoning about geometric problems. The available data and preferred shape representation, however, varies widely from one application to the next. Indeed, the one commonality among most of these settings is that they are not easily approached using data-driven methods that have become de rigueur in other branches of computer vision and machine learning. In this talk, I will summarize... SHE S Ladies Night Eevent 2022 Sunday, 19.06.2022, 19:30 CS Taub Terrace You are invited to the the lady students community annual event at Technion CS, on Sunday, June 19, 2022, starting at 19:00 on the Taub terrace. In the program: 19:00 - Mingling, sushi and beers 20:00 - Stand-up show by Mor Chen 21:00 - Afterparty Karaoke Please pre-register (registration for the event involves a nominal fee).... Theory Seminar: Binary Codes with Resilience Beyond 1/4 via Interaction Klim Efremenko (Ben-Gurion University) Wednesday, 15.06.2022, 12:30 Taub 201 In the reliable transmission problem, a sender, Alice, wishes to transmit a bit-string x to a remote receiver, Bob, over a binary channel with adversarial noise. The solution to this problem is to encode x using an error-correcting code. As it is long known that the distance of binary codes is at most 1/2, reliable transmission is possible only if the channel corrupts (flips) at most a 1/4-fraction of the communicated bits. We revisit the reliable transmission problem in the tw... Machine Learning and Real-time AI: Reveal the Mystery Tuesday, 14.06.2022, 18:30 Zoom Event: Registration You are invited to a technology enrichment lecture, by Nava Levy, AI / ML Dev Advocate, Redis, on machine learning in the high-tech industry, with an emphasis on real-time machine learning, and the difference between it and deep learning and the challenges in real-time AI, on roles and responsibilities of a typical data science and machine learning team in an industrial company, on the differences between research and practice, and on tools that can be started today. The lectur... TRX'22: Technion Robotics Expo Sunday, 12.06.2022, 16:30 CS Taub Build. Auditorium 1 You are invited to the TRX'22: Technion Robotics Expo, on Sunday, June 12, 2022, 16:30-20:00 in CS Taub Auditorium 1. Please pre-register. ... Theory Seminar: Nonlinear Repair Schemes of Reed-Solomon Codes Itzhak Tamo (Tel-Aviv University) Wednesday, 08.06.2022, 12:30 Taub 201 The problem of repairing linear codes, particularly Reed Solomon (RS) codes, has attracted a lot of attention in recent years due to its importance in distributed storage systems. In this problem, a failed code symbol (node) needs to be repaired by downloading as little information as possible from a subset of the remaining nodes. There are examples of RS codes with efficient repair schemes, and some are even optimal. However, these schemes fall short in several aspects; for examp... Recruitment Day by Vast Data Wednesday, 08.06.2022, 12:30 CS Taub Lobby and Visitors Center Auditorium Vast Data engineers and recruitment teams will arrive at CS to demonstrate technologies and offer open positions, on Wednesday, June 8, 2022, 12:30, in the Taub Lobby, and at 13:30 for a technological lecture on the challenges of building data structures and distributed algorithms used to establish the largest storage systems in the world, in th... ceClub: Conflict and Technology, AI Chip Wars from the Inside Out Oskar Mencer (Maxeler Technologies) Wednesday, 08.06.2022, 11:30 Room 861, EE Meyer Building and zoom Lecture: 91011338796 The microprocessor is 50 years old. 50 years ago, a single ALU at kHz speeds had to be shared by multiple tasks, multiple applications, multiple users and multiple organizations. Due to transistor scaling we can now have 1M ALUs on a chip at GHz speeds. In this talk I will swap the cause and effect equation, instead of talking about solutions to problems, I will talk about problems created by solutions. Today data movement dominates compute time. I will describe how by optimally s... CGGC Seminar: Nozzle Modification for Efficient FDM 3D Printing Shir Rorberg (CS, Technion) Wednesday, 08.06.2022, 10:00 Taub 401 3D printing is based on layered manufacturing, where the layers are printed consecutively in increasing height order. In Fused Depositing Modeling (FDM), the printing head may travel without extruding material between separated “islands” of the sliced layers. These travel movements increase the printing time and reduce the quality of the 3D printed part. We present an extended nozzle modification, which can be applied to off-the-shelf FDM printers, and a corresponding toolpath... Online Meeting: How to be "On it" Financially Tuesday, 07.06.2022, 18:30 Zoom Event: Registration You are invited to an online meeting led by Yael Marom, Savings Product Manager at RiseUp, on: How to be "on it" financially, which will explain in depth what our monthly financial situation is and the way to know how much we really need to spend, how to prepare ahead, for short term and long term, in order to gradually build our economic growth, on Tuesday, June 7, at 18:30. For link to the meeting ... Robustness and Rotation Equivariance in Geometric Deep Learning Ben Finkelshtein Tuesday, 07.06.2022, 11:30 Graph neural networks (GNNs) have shown broad applicability in a variety of domains. These domains, e.g., social networks and recommendation systems, are fertile ground for malicious users and behavior. In a series of works, we study the robustness of GNNs under different scenarios and present a simple rotation and permutation equivariant point-cloud GNN. We show that GNNs are vulnerable to the scenario of strategic behavior of multiple users (i.e., Strategic Classification... Theory Seminar: From Selection Theorems to Weak Epsilon-Nets in Higher Dimensions (and back?) Natan Rubin (Ben-Gurion University) Wednesday, 01.06.2022, 12:30 Taub 201 Given a finite point set$P$in$R^d$, and$\eps>0$we say that a point set$N$in$R^d$is a weak$\eps$-net if it pierces every convex set$K$with$|K\cap P|\geq \eps |P|$. Let$d\geq 3$. We show that for any finite point set in$R^d$, and any$\eps>0$, there exists a weak$\eps$-net of cardinality$o(1/\eps^{d-1/2})$. Here$delta>0$is an arbitrary small constant. This is the first improvement of the bound of$O^*(1/\eps^d)$that was obtained in 1993 by Chazelle, Edelsbrunne... Recruitment Day by Vayyar Wednesday, 01.06.2022, 10:30 Vayyar representatives will visit CS to demonstrate 3D sensor technologies capable of seeing through objects, and for a lecture on 13:30 by Uri Adar, Vayyar system group member, about 3D imaging in RF, on Wednesday, June 1, 2022, between 10:30-14:30, at the CS Taub Lobby. More details in the attached poster. Please ... Pixel Club: Moving Forward with StyleGAN to Real Data and New Domains Ron Mokady (Tel-Aviv University) Tuesday, 31.05.2022, 11:30 Zoom Lecture: https://technion.zoom.us/my/chaimbaskin StyleGAN is already quite famous for its unremarkable image editing capabilities. Although other generative models (e.g. diffusion models) achieve comparable synthesis quality, they cannot reproduce these semantically richmanipulations. In particular, StyleGAN allows the modification of various attributes, such as hair, age, pose, expression, and make-up, while still maintaining a high level of realism. Yet, it is still challenging to leverage these traits for real data or new ... Microsoft Lecture: Improving Productivity Through NLP Tuesday, 24.05.2022, 17:00 Room 337 Taub Bld. You are invited to a technological lecture by Dikla Dotan Cohen, Director of Research at Microsoft, on Improving Productivity Through NLP, which will present the methodology of Office 365 products and the challenges it poses, on Tuesday, May 24, 17:00, in Room 337, CS Taub Building. Please pre-register.... CS-Hackathon 2022 - Doing Good Thursday, 19.05.2022, 09:30 CS Taub Building You are invited to join the CS Hackathon-Doing Good programming competition to be held on Thursday-Friday, May 19-20, 2022, at CS Taub Building, and which this year will deal with social work and community contribution, and will focus on developing engineering-technological solutions to increase accessibility for people with disabilities, to help them improve their quality of life.- an opportunity to implement creative ideas that promote values ​​of involvement and con... Moran Samuel: "To Cross the Line" Thursday, 19.05.2022, 09:00 CS Taub Build. Auditorium 1 You are invited to a lecture by Moran Samuel, Paralympic Medalist who will light a beacon on the upcoming Independence Day, and a visitor of the CS-Hackathon 2022, which this year deals with developing solutions to increase accessibility for people with disabilities, and who will tell about her life as an athlete and a winner, on Thursday, May 19, 2022, at 09:00, CS Taub Building Auditorium 1. ... Recruitment Day by CYE Wednesday, 18.05.2022, 12:30 CS Taub Lobby You are invited to a Recruitment Day by CYE, that provides security solutions for organizations, on Wednesday, May 18, 2022, starting at 12:30 in of the Taub Building lobby, and between 13: 30-14: 30 for a technology lecture on "Cyber, Programming and all in between" - attacks and strategies using code - by Eyal Greenberg, one of the company's founders and leader of the research team. Please ... Theory Seminar: Temporal Path Finding in the Presence of Delays Hendrik Molter (Ben-Gurion University) Wednesday, 18.05.2022, 12:30 Taub 201 Consider planning a trip in a train network. In contrast to, say, a road network, the edges are temporal, i.e., they are only available at certain times. Another important difficulty is that trains, unfortunately, sometimes get delayed. This is especially bad if it causes one to miss subsequent trains. The best way to prepare against this is to have a connection that is robust to some number of (small) delays. An important factor in determining the robustness of a connection is ho... ceClub: Non-explicit Information Exchange in Distributed Computing Guy Goren (EE, Technion) Wednesday, 18.05.2022, 11:30 Room 861, EE Meyer Building and zoom Lecture: 92697362743 Distributed systems become more and more ubiquitous. These systems entail different instances of distributed computing problems, each with unique characteristics. In this talk, I will discuss my Ph.D. research on theoretical and algorithmic aspects of distributed computing. Specifically, I will focus on two works that represent different aspects of my research on non-explicit information exchange in distributed systems. I will start with a fundamental work on concepts of informati... Sound Source Modeling of Drones In Free Space and Indoors towards Acoustic-Based Indoor Localization Tom Hirshberg Sunday, 15.05.2022, 11:30 Zoom Lecture: 92351875339 To model the self-sound of drones, acoustics analysis and high-fidelity computational fluid dynamic methods can be used. However, these methods require significant computational resources. Therefore, data-driven and analytical methods are commonly used to model the sound source, enabling the generation of a pressure-time history of the moving rotors along a time varying shaft position. We suggest a simple and low computational data-driven method for modeling the sound source of a ... Theory Seminar: On the Size of Succinct Non-interactive Arguments in the Random Oracle Model Eylon Yogev (Bar-Ilan University) Wednesday, 11.05.2022, 12:30 Taub 201 Are all SNARG constructions in the random oracle model inherently large? The answer to this question is still open, but I will survey recent work that makes significant progress towards a solution. In particular, we will see a new construction that achieves a smaller argument size. This is the first progress on the Micali construction since it was introduced over 25 years ago. Our construction relies on a strong soundness notion for PCPs and a weak binding notion for commitm... Preparation Workshop for Technical Interviews Tuesday, 10.05.2022, 17:30 Zoom Event: Registration You are invited to a preparation workshop for technical Interviews, led by Or Ben-Hayal, CS graduate and software engineer at Google, which will deal with the components of the job interview and review common mistakes made by candidates, and which will include a preparatory lecture for the various aspects of the interview, as well as practice of technical questions from job interviews and their solutions, on Tuesday, May 10, 2022, at 17:30. in Taub 337. Please ... Pixel Club: Fundamental Visual Motion Cues for Autonomous Navigation Daniel Raviv (Florida Atlantic University (FAU)) Tuesday, 10.05.2022, 11:00 Room 337 Taub Bld. This talk is about low-level fundamental visual motion cues that can help autonomous vehicles navigate in unknown structured and unstructured environments. Following bio-inspired and behavior-based observations and motivations, the talk focuses on relevant concepts and recent results as obtained from simulated and real data. Some of the visual cues, e.g., the“visual looming” cue, are environment, scale, and rotation independent, and are measured in time units. Obtaining ... Scalable Blockchain Anomaly Detection with Sketches Tomer Voronov Tuesday, 10.05.2022, 09:00 Zoom Lecture: 93456393216 The growing popularity of Blockchain networks attracts also malicious and hacking users. Effectively detecting inappropriate and malicious activity should thus be a top priority for safeguarding blockchain networks and services. Blockchain behavior analysis can be used to detect unusual account activities or time periods with network-wide irregular properties. Thus, optimized anomaly detection based on historical data is an essential task for securing transactions and services. Ho... Recruitment Day by Pikoya Monday, 09.05.2022, 10:00 CS Taub Lobby You are invited to Recruitment Day by Pikoya (startup in publication and online games promoting), to meet their engineers and recruitment staff, to be held on Monday, May 9, 2022, starting at 10:00, at the Taub Lobby. You are all invited! ... Practical Workshop in Linkedin Monday, 02.05.2022, 18:30 Zoom Event: Registration You are invited for a practical LinkedIn workshop, led by Anat Kegel Taub, director of the Sourcing Team at Meta, who will provide tips to help you brand yourself to future recruiters, executives and co-workers, on Monday, May 2, 2022, at 18:30 in Taub 337. Please pre-register.... Towards Predicting Fine Finger Motions from Ultrasound Images via Kinematic Representation Dean Zadok Wednesday, 27.04.2022, 11:30 Zoom Lecture: 95614804430 A central challenge in building robotic prostheses is the creation of a sensor-based system able to read physiological signals from the lower limb and instruct a robotic hand to perform various tasks. Existing systems typically perform discrete gestures such as pointing or grasping, by employing electromyography (EMG) or ultrasound (US) technologies to analyze the state of the muscles. In this research, we study the inference problem of identifying the activation of specific f... ceClub: Twilight: A Differentially Private Payment Yossi Gilad (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) Monday, 25.04.2022, 11:30 Room 861, EE Meyer Building and zoom Lecture: 93108695810 Payment channel networks (PCNs) provide a faster and cheaper alternative to transactions recorded on the blockchain. Clients can trustlessly establish payment channels with relays by locking coins and then send signed payments that shift coin balances over the network’s channels. Although payments are never published, anyone can track a client’s payment by monitoring changes in coin balances over the network’s channels. We present Twilight, the first PCN that provides a rigo... Distributional Robustness: From Pricing to Auctions Nir Bachrach Thursday, 14.04.2022, 10:30 Zoom Lecture: 93646072404 Robust mechanism design is a rising alternative to Bayesian mechanism design, which yields designs that do not rely on assumptions like full distributional knowledge. We apply this approach to mechanisms for selling a single item, assuming that only the mean and range of the distribution of buyer values is known. We seek the mechanism that maximizes revenue over the worst-case distribution compatible with the known parameters. Such a mechanism arises as an equilibrium of a zero-su... Theory Seminar: Efficient Multiparty Interactive Coding for Insertions, Deletions and Substitutions Ran Gelles (Bar-Ilan University) Wednesday, 13.04.2022, 12:30 Taub 601 Taub Bld. Interactive coding allows two or more parties to carry out a distributed computation over a communication network that may be noisy. The ultimate goal is to develop efficient coding schemes that tolerate a high level of noise while increasing the communication by only a constant factor (i.e., constant rate). In this work we provide computationally efficient, constant rate schemes that conduct any computation on arbitrary networks, and succeed with high probability in the presence ... Only Real Friends Matter - A clusters Based Deep Learning Paradigm For High Dimension Multivariate Forecasting Raphael Gad Wednesday, 13.04.2022, 08:30 Zoom Lecture: 96767407060 Multivariate time series forecasting differs from univariate time series forecasting by trying to model the dependencies between the different time series in order to make a more precise forecasting. Despite reaching better results in a multivariate setting, classical and deep learning multivariate models are not scalable, having their total number of parameters growing square of the number of time-series. We present in this paper a novel paradigm in how deep learning models shall... Recruitment Day by Philips Tuesday, 12.04.2022, 11:00 CS Taub Lobby You are invited to recruitment day by Philips and to meet their engineers and recruitment staff, on Tuesday, April 12, 2022, starting at 11:00, at the CS Taub Lobby. You are all invited!... Intel Preparatory Workshop for Job Interview Monday, 11.04.2022, 18:00 Zoom Event: Registration You are invited to Intel preparation workshop for the technical part in job interview, on Monday, April 11, 2022, 18:00, in a zoom session - a link will be sent after pre-registration. You are all invited!... qualitative SLAM Roee Mor Monday, 11.04.2022, 10:00 Zoom Lecture: 98073608338 Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is essential in numerous robotics applications such as autonomous navigation. Traditional SLAM approaches infer the metric state of the robot (position and orientation) along with a metric map of the environment. While existing algorithms exhibit good results, they are still sensitive to measurement noise, sensors quality, data association and are still computationally expensive. Computational load is especially problematic in active pl... Research Meetup with a Focus on NLP Wednesday, 06.04.2022, 18:30 Taub Terrace You are invited to the first Research Meetup with a focus on NLP, on Wednesday, April 6th, 18:30 in the Taub Terrace. The Meeting's goal is to bring together Israel’s ML and NLP communities in a setting far more casual than the traditional well known seminar/conference/poster session. The event format will be as follows: - The night will open with a quick speech from Professor Yonatan Belinkov - A meeting of undergraduate and graduate students, researchers and faculty wi... Theory Seminar: Public-Key Quantum Money with a Classical Bank Omri Shmueli (Tel-Aviv University) Wednesday, 06.04.2022, 12:30 Taub 201 Quantum money is a main primitive in quantum cryptography, that enables a bank to distribute to parties in the network, called wallets, unclonable quantum banknotes that serve as a medium of exchange between wallets. While quantum money suggests a theoretical solution to some of the fundamental problems in currency systems, it still requires a strong model to be implemented; quantum computation and a quantum communication infrastructure. A central open question in this context is ... Geometric Sorting of Simple Agents on Grid Environments with applications to autonomous traffic management Dmitry Rabinovich Tuesday, 05.04.2022, 11:30 Zoom Lecture: 8206122066 We study a geometrically constrained combinatorial problem inspired by the following scenario: autonomous vehicles move on a$m$-lane freeway, where$m \geq 2\$. Each vehicle heads to some destination and is allowed to exit the road only through a designated exit lane when approaching its destination. We assume that vehicles have limited memory and sensing capabilities, and cannot directly communicate with their peers. We present a completely decentralized distributed algorith...

Temporal Graphs: Embedding with Fairness
Uriel Singer
Sunday, 03.04.2022, 11:45
Zoom Lecture: 96690022933
In this thesis, we study temporal graphs and how to best represent their nodes and edges for multiple classification tasks. We first study the basics of how to represent nodes and edges in (un)weighted and (un)directed temporal graphs. We then present methods to leverage different aspects of temporal graphs, such as a temporal message passing and multiple attributes over edges. Finally, we study how bias manifests itself in temporal graphs and propose methods to balance accuracy a...

Learning Multigrid
Dmitry Kuznichov
Thursday, 31.03.2022, 14:00
Zoom Lecture: 95779590888
During the last decade, Neural Networks (NNs) have proved to be extremely effective tools in many fields of engineering, including autonomous vehicles, medical diagnosis and search engines, and even in art creation. Indeed, NNs often decisively outperform traditional algorithms. One area that is only recently attracting significant interest is using NNs for designing numerical solvers, particularly for discretized partial differential equations. Several recent papers have consider...

Improved Bounds for Online Aggregation and Caching
Wednesday, 30.03.2022, 14:00
Taub 601 Taub Bld.
Uncertainty is a key factor in real-time systems, where decisions must be made over time based on incomplete or partial information. Competitive analysis is the prominent paradigm for the design and analysis of algorithms for such environments, which are called online algorithms. The field of competitive analysis has been studied extensively throughout the last few decades, and is highly useful in the analysis of such real-time systems. In an online problem data is revealed ove...

Best Project Contest - The Finals
Wednesday, 30.03.2022, 12:30
CS Taub Lobby
You are invited to the finals event of the Best Project Contest, that will take place in the format of a project fair, on Wednesday, March 30, 2022, starting at 12:30, and to the announcing and awarding the winners at 14:00, at the CS Taub Lobby. You are all invited to come and meet the best researchers and researches!...

Theory Seminar: Locality-Preserving Hashing for Shifts with Connections to Cryptography
Wednesday, 30.03.2022, 12:30
Taub 201 Taub Bld.
Alice receives a non-periodic string (such as ABCDEF), while Bob receives a string (such as CDEFAB), obtained by applying a hidden cyclic shift to Alice’s string. Alice and Bob query their strings in a small number of positions (sublinear in the amount of shifting) and then exchange a single short message. How can they detect the shift with minimal error probability? Based on Joint works with Elette Boyle, Itai Dinur, Niv Gilboa, Yuval Ishai, Nathan Keller. ...

ceClub: Three Papers Session
Alon Rashelbach, Lior Zeno, Haggai Eran
Wednesday, 30.03.2022, 11:30
Room 861, EE Meyer Building and zoom Lecture: 96624383219
In this CE club session, we will present three papers that will appear next week at NSDI'22: Scaling Open vSwitch with a Computational Cache by Alon Rashelbach Open vSwitch (OVS) is a widely used open-source virtual switch implementation. In this work, we seek to scale up OVS to support hundreds of thousands of OpenFlow rules by accelerating the core component of its data-path – the packet classification mechanism. To do so we use NuevoMatch, a recent algorithm tha...

Theory Seminar: On the Complexity of Two-Party Differential Privacy
Wednesday, 23.03.2022, 12:30
Taub 201 Taub Bld.
In distributed differential privacy, the parties perform analysis over their joint data while preserving the privacy for both datasets. Interestingly, for a few fundamental two-party functions such as inner product and Hamming distance, the accuracy of the distributed solution lags way behind what is achievable in the client-server setting. McGregor, Mironov, Pitassi, Reingold, Talwar, and Vadhan [FOCS ’10] proved that this gap is inherent, showing upper bounds on the accuracy o...

CS Open Day for Graduate Studies
Wednesday, 23.03.2022, 12:30
Room 337 Taub Bld.
Technion CS open day 2022 invites outstanding undergraduates from all universities to learn about the Computer Science Department and register for Winter Semester 2022-23. The event will be held on Wednesday, March23, 2022. between 12:30-14:00, room 337, Taub Building for Computer Science, Technion. The program will include review on curriculum, r...

How Gender Debiasing of NLP Models Affects Internal Model Representations, and Why It Matters
Wednesday, 23.03.2022, 10:00
Zoom Lecture: 98412403331
Common studies of gender bias in natural language processing (NLP) focus either on extrinsic bias which is measured by model performance on a specific task or on intrinsic bias which is measured on a models' internal representations. However, the relationship between extrinsic and intrinsic bias is relatively unknown. In this work, we illuminate this relationship by measuring both quantities together: we debias a model during downstream fine-tuning, which reduces extrinsic bias, a...

Recruitment Day by NVIDIA
Monday, 21.03.2022, 12:00
CS Taub Lobby
CS students are invited to Recruitment Day by NVIDIA to be held on Monday, March 21, 2022, 12:00, in the CS Taub Lobby. You are all invited....

Constructions and Bounds of Codes Correcting Combinations of Deletion Errors
Ilia Smagloy
Tuesday, 15.03.2022, 15:00
Zoom Lecture: 92542730788
Correcting insertions/deletions as well as substitution errors simultaneously plays an important role in DNA-based storage systems as well as in classical communications. However, in DNA data storage as well as in file/symbol synchronization, not only insertions/deletions occur, but also classical substitution errors. Additionally, some cases feature array-like words and as such pose a new type of variance in insertions/deletions errors - column insertions/deletions as opposed to ...

Semantic Perception under Uncertainty with Viewpoint-Dependent Models
Yuri Feldman
Tuesday, 15.03.2022, 11:30
Zoom Lecture: 98353402261
Semantic perception is the process of acquiring and maintaining knowledge of the environment of a robot (or more generally - embodied agent) beyond geometric structure, i.e. capturing meaning - such as classes and other high-level properties of visible scene elements - as opposed to pure geometry. Semantic perception is key to enabling autonomous robots to operate in diverse, low-structured and dynamic environments and alongside humans. In the past decade semantic information has ...

CS Orientation Day 2022
Tuesday, 15.03.2022, 11:00
CS Taub Build. Auditorium 1
CS 2022 Orientation Day for new students will be held on Tuesday, March 15, 2022, and will begin at 10:00 with a Technion meeting at the Churchill Auditorium where the Senior Vice President, the Dean for Undergraduate Studies and the Students Dean and Chairman of the Technion Student Association will speak to the new students, and between 11:00-14:00 there will be a gathering at the Computer Science Taub Building, and a meeting at the Taub 1 Auditorium in the entrance floor, which...

PartTLB: Dynamic TLB Partitioning for SMT Systems
Maxim Barsky
Thursday, 10.03.2022, 15:30
Zoom Lecture: 93840198625
Simultaneous multithreading (SMT) increases the cost of memory address translation due to sharing of the translation lookaside buffer (TLB) among multiple threads. Current x86 processors use a competitively-shared’’ TLB, in which low-locality threads might needlessly waste TLB resources and thus degrade the performance of neighboring high-locality threads. To address this problem, we introduce PartTLB, a new mechanism that: (1) samples the TLB requests of the competing threa...

Model-Based Simulation for SMT Cores
Idan Raz
Thursday, 10.03.2022, 14:30
Zoom Lecture: 91575675908
Studies that evaluate new architectural designs of virtual memory typically employ a model-based’’ methodology that relies on simulations of the translation lookaside buffer (TLB) coupled with empirical performance models. We observe that this methodology is limited in that each simulated thread of execution has its own dedicated TLB, whereas modern processors share a single TLB among multiple threads through simultaneous multithreading’’ (SMT). Existing model-based re...

Analyzing Individual Neurons in Language Models
Omer Antverg
Wednesday, 09.03.2022, 11:00
Zoom Lecture: 93322539388
Neural language models have significantly developed in recent years, becoming more and more successful on numerous language tasks. Those models rely on encoding words as hidden vector representations, before utilizing these representations for the task at hand. Their success spiked interest in their interpretability: understanding how they work, and what is encoded within these representations. While many studies have shown that linguistic information is encoded in hidden word rep...

ceClub: Embedded Systems and Security
Wednesday, 02.03.2022, 11:30
Room 861, EE Meyer Building and zoom Lecture: 96393404383
Protecting intellectual properties from untrusted design houses and foundries has become highly challenging. In this talk, I will focus on the security aspects of embedded systems. First, I will discuss the logic locking tools and attack methods developed at the Institute for Communication Technologies and Embedded Systems, RWTH Aachen University. In the second part of the talk, I will focus on developing low-power, high-performance embedded systems based on emerging non-volatile ...

Improving Graph Neural Networks Expressivity Via Spectral and Combinatorial Pre-Colorings
Or Feldman
Tuesday, 01.03.2022, 11:00
Zoom Lecture: 96864188946
Graph isomorphism testing is usually approached via the comparison of graph invariants. Two popular alternatives that offer a good trade-off between expressive power and computational efficiency are combinatorial (i.e., obtained via the Weisfeiler-Leman (WL) test) and spectral invariants. While the exact power of the latter is still an open question, the former is regularly criticized for its limited power, when a standard configuration of uniform pre-coloring is used. This drawba...

Semantic Symmetry in Transducers
Antonio Abu Nassar
Monday, 28.02.2022, 11:30
Zoom Lecture: 98340908086
In model checking, we work toward deciding whether a system satisfies a given specification. Often, a system exhibits some type of symmetry in its structure or in its behaviour. Such symmetries can be exploited by a designer to alleviate some of the complexity of model checking, as well as to gain insight into the behaviour of the system. Thus, we want to decide whether a given system exhibits symmetry. Symmetry is not a well-defined concept and might come in various forms, eac...

A Meeting with Potential Students for Technion CS Studies
Thursday, 24.02.2022, 10:00
Zoom Event: Registration
A meeting with potential students who are interested in studies at the Technion and the Faculty of Computer Science will be held online on CS Facebook, onThursday, February 24, 2022, at 10:100 and at 14:00. Details and registration. ...

TCE-MLIS 2021 Conference
Thursday, 24.02.2022, 08:30
ELMA Arts Complex, Zichron Ya'acov
MLIS, the Technion AI center, in collaboration with TCE, would like to invite you to participate in the annual MILS-TCE conference. AI is now a major buzz word everywhere and expectations are sky-rocketing, but what is true state-of-the-art and what can be actually implemented in the AI and Machine Learning fields? In a series of lectures, Techni...

REDEEMER: Reinforcement Learning Based CEP Pattern Miner for Knowledge Extraction
Guy Shapira
Wednesday, 23.02.2022, 09:00
Zoom Lecture: 94383091556
Complex Event Processing (CEP) are a set of methods that allow efficient knowledge extraction from massive data streams using complex and highly descriptive patterns. As of today, in many fields, patterns are manually defined by human experts. However, desired patterns often contain convoluted relations that are difficult for humans to detect, and human expertise is scarce in many domains. We present REDEEMER, a novel reinforcement and active learning approach aimed at mining C...

DELETE: Using deep learning to minimize latency in CEP systems
Gal Sidi
Monday, 21.02.2022, 09:30
Zoom Lecture: 98932630687
The ability to detect complex patterns in massive data streams is critical for many real-time applications. These applications must uphold low latency requirements, delivering alerts and notifications with minimal response delays. Complex event processing (CEP), a leading technology for performing this task, is suitable for the efficient and robust detection of complex patterns. However, the CEP complexity grows exponentially with respect to the length of the pattern and the inten...

CloudWalker: 3D Point Cloud Learning by Random Walks for Shape Analysis
Tuesday, 08.02.2022, 11:30
Point clouds are gaining prominence as a method for representing 3D shapes, but their irregular structure poses a challenge for deep learning methods. In this paper we propose CloudWalker, a novel method for learning 3D shapes using random walks. Previous works attempt to adapt Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNS) or impose a grid or mesh structure to 3D point clouds. This work presents a different approach for representing and learning the shape from a given point set. The ke...

Tuesday, 08.02.2022, 10:30
Neural networks that are based on unfolding of an iterativesolver, such as LISTA (learned iterative soft threshold algorithm), are widelyused due to their accelerated performance. Nevertheless, as opposed tonon-learned solvers, these networks are trained on a certain dictionary, andtherefore they are inapplicable for varying model scenarios. This talkintroduces an adaptive learned solver, termed Ada-LISTA, which receives pairsof signals and their corresponding dictionaries as inpu...

ILP Based Load Balancing in Deduplicated Storage Systems
Ariel Kolikant
Sunday, 06.02.2022, 12:00
Zoom Lecture: 97413372304
Deduplication reduces the size of the data stored in large-scale storage systems by replacing duplicate data blocks with references to their unique copies. This creates dependencies between files that contain similar content and complicates the management of data in the system. In the work presented in this seminar, we have addressed the problem of data migration, where files are remapped between different volumes because of system expansion or maintenance. The challenge of det...

Clustering Based Data Migration in Deduplicated Storage
Roei Kisous
Tuesday, 01.02.2022, 13:30
Zoom Lecture: 8183278482
Deduplication is a leading method for reducing physical storage capacity when duplicate data is present. This method can be applied on chunks, files, containers, and more. Instead of storing the same physical data multiple times, a pointer is created from each logical copy to the same physical copy, saving the space of the duplicate data. Due to this, data is shared between objects, such as files or entire directories, which result in garbage collection overhead and migration chal...

CGGC Seminar: Trading Memory for Computations: Scaling Range Matching on the Critical Path
Alon Rashelbach (EE, Technion)
Sunday, 30.01.2022, 13:30
Zoom Lecture: 96379418284
Range matching (RM) is a crucial component in computer systems, widely used in address translation, hard drives, network switches, and many more applications. RM is performed whenever one wishes to locate a range that contains an input number, given a large set of ranges. Any page-based mechanism uses RM, as pages are basically ranges. Longest prefix matching (LPM) uses ternary rules, which are also ranges. Firewalls are one example of multidimensional RM since ACL rules consist o...

ceClub: SmartNIC Inline Processing
Haggai Eran (EE, Technion)
Wednesday, 26.01.2022, 11:30
Zoom Lecture: 97164378341
The inline processing technique enables data transformation as a system transfers data to or from a processing node. It is used to offload computations and accelerate data-intensive communication tasks, reducing latency and power due to data movement and improving throughput by using the best processing core for the job. However, inline processing poses several challenges: it breaks existing operating system and network stack layers and makes it difficult to reuse previous softwar...

pISTA: preconditioned Iterative Soft Thresholding Algorithm for Graphical Lasso
Gal Shalom
Wednesday, 26.01.2022, 10:30
Zoom Lecture: 91228689582
We propose a novel quasi-Newton method for solving the sparse inverse covariance estimation problem also known as the graphical least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (GLASSO). This problem is often solved using a second order quadratic approximation. However, in such algorithms the Hessian term is complex and computationally expensive to handle. To this end,our algorithm uses the inverse of the Hessian as a preconditioner to simplify and approximate the quadratic e...

Pixel Club: TextAdaIN: Paying Attention to Shortcut Learning in TextRecognizers
Oren Nuriel (AWS)
Tuesday, 25.01.2022, 11:30
Leveragingthe characteristics of convolutional layers, neural networks are extremelyeffective for pattern recognition tasks. However in some cases,their decisions are based on unintended information leading to high performanceon standard benchmarks but also to a lack of generalization to challengingtesting conditions and unintuitive failures. Recentworkhas termed this “shortcut learning” and addressed its presence in multipledomains. In text recognition, we reveal another such...

Solving Constrained Horn Clauses Lazily and Incrementally
Omer Rappoport
Tuesday, 25.01.2022, 10:30
Zoom Lecture: 93910185113
Constrained Horn Clauses (CHCs) is a fragment of First Order Logic (FOL), that has gained a lot of attention in recent years. One of the main reasons for the rising interest in CHCs is the ability to reduce many verification problems to satisfiability of CHCs. For example, program verification can naturally be described as the satisfiability of CHCs modulo a background theory such as linear arithmetic and arrays. To this end, CHC-solvers can be used as the back-end for different v...

Efficient Self-Supervised Data Collection for Offline Robot Learning
Monday, 24.01.2022, 15:00
Zoom Lecture: 7446114621
a large batch of real or simulated robot interaction data, using some data collection policy, and then learn from this data to perform various tasks, using offline learning algorithms. Previous work focused on manually designing the data collection policy, and on tasks where suitable policies can easily be designed, such as random picking policies for collecting data about object grasping. For more complex tasks, however, it may be difficult to find a data collection policy that e...

CS LECTURE: Mathematical Foundations of Robust Geometry and Fabrication
Oded Stein (MIT)
Monday, 24.01.2022, 15:00
Zoom Lecture: 91550335554
Current geometry methods for creating and manipulating shapes on computers can sometimes be unreliable and fail unpredictably. Such failures make geometry tools hard to use, prevent non-experts from creating geometry on their computers, and limit the use of geometry methods in domains where reliability is critical. We will discuss my recent efforts in proving when existing methods work as intended, my work in making methods more robust to imperfect input, my work in the creatio...

SMEGA2: Distributed Deep Learning Using a Single Momentum Buffer
Refael Cohen
Monday, 24.01.2022, 10:00
Zoom Lecture: 92984244781
As the field of deep learning progresses, and models become larger and larger, training deep neural networks has become a demanding task. The task requires a huge amount of compute power, and can still be very time consuming - especially when using just a single GPU. To tackle this problem, distributed deep learning has come into play, with various asynchronous training algorithms. However, most of these algorithms suffer from decreased accuracy as the number of workers increases....

Mathematical Techniques for Cryptanalysis
Stav Perle
Thursday, 20.01.2022, 15:00
Zoom Lecture: 92017151302
Symmetric ciphers are cryptographic algorithms that use the same cryptographic keys for both encryption and decryption. The key represents a shared secret between users, that is used to maintain a private information link. In our research we focus on cryptanalysis of block ciphers, which are the most widely used realization of symmetric ciphers. Block ciphers are cryptosystems that consist of two algorithms, an encryption algorithm that accepts a symmetric key and a plaintext ...

How to Avoid Depth Reconstruction in 3D Vision Tasks: Do We Need Depth in State-Of-The-Art Face Authentication?
Amir Livne
Tuesday, 18.01.2022, 13:30
Zoom Lecture: 94951674375
Face recognition systems are frequently used in a variety of security applications in our daily lives. Some methods are designed to utilize geometric information extracted from depth sensors to overcome single-image-based recognition technologies’ weaknesses, such as vulnerability to illumination variations, large head poses, and spoofing attacks. However, the accurate acquisition of the depth profile or surface is an expensive and challenging process. We introduce a novel metho...

Pixel Club: Endless Loops: Detecting and Animating Periodic Patterns in Still Images
Tavi Halperin (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Tuesday, 18.01.2022, 11:30
We present an algorithm for producing a seamless animated loop from a single image. The algorithm detects periodic structures, such as the windows of a building or the steps of a staircase, and generates a non-trivial displacement vector field that maps each segment of the structure onto a neighboring segment along a user- or auto-selected main direction of motion. This displacement field is used, together with suitable temporal and spatial smoothing, to warp the image and produce...

Bribery attack on Nakamoto Consensus Proof of Stake Protocols
Tom Brand
Sunday, 16.01.2022, 15:00
Zoom Lecture: 7228552597
Bitcoin was introduced to the world in 2009 with Proof of Work (PoW) Leader Election as one of its novel building blocks. Since then, much criticism has been made of its high energy consumption. Proof of Stake protocols aims at replacing PoW protocols as a much more efficient version while still maintaining its security properties under the Honest Majority model. In our work, we show a bribery attack under the Rational Majority model, which breaks the persistence security prope...

Securing ICS Protocols
Alon Dankner
Sunday, 16.01.2022, 10:30
Zoom Lecture: 8899993884
Industrial Control Systems (ICSs), also known as Operation Technology (OT) systems, are distributed computerized systems designed to manage, monitor and control industrial processes. They are widely used in critical infrastructures, such as power plants and water supply, whose continuous operation is of major importance to modern life. Following the well-known Stuxnet attack on OT systems, a large investment in OT security was started. Though their cyber protection is crucial, ...

CS LECTURE: Computing Using Time
George Tzimpragos (UC Santa Barbara and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)
Wednesday, 12.01.2022, 17:30
Zoom Lecture: 96743325005
The development of computing systems able to address our ever-increasing needs, especially as we reach the end of CMOS transistor scaling, requires truly novel methods of computing. My research draws inspiration from biology, rethinks the digital/analog boundary, and challenges conventional wisdom, which typically guides how we perform computation, by reimagining the role of time. In this talk, I first introduce a computational temporal logic that sets the foundation for tempo...

An Automata Theory Method for the Analysis of Unicycle Pursuit Problems
David Dovrat
Wednesday, 12.01.2022, 13:30
Zoom Lecture: 8206122066
The Pursuit Problem depicts a scenario where a moving target is pursued by an agent, whose movement is prescribed by some defined policy. Examples of what can be regarded as solutions to the pursuit problem include the shape of the agent's trajectory, whether the agent ultimately captures the target, and the circumstances of the capture, including the time required for capture to be achieved, The Unicycle Model is a popular simplification used to describe the kinematics of ...

Distributed Deep Neural Networks
Ido Hakimi
Tuesday, 11.01.2022, 13:00
Zoom Lecture: 99195189391
Training deep neural networks in the distributed asynchronous setting is complicated. In the distributed asynchronous setting, the computational devices run in parallel, causing a delay in the propagation of information between the different computational devices. The delay is often referred to as staleness, which harms the training process and the quality of the deep neural network. This staleness is one of the main difficulties in scaling asynchronous settings to a large number ...

Pixel Club: Layered Neural Atlases for Consistent Video Editing
Dolev Ofri (Weizmann Institute of Science)
Tuesday, 11.01.2022, 11:30
While image editing and manipulation tools have seen steady progress, allowing complex editing effects to be achieved by novice users, video editing remains a difficult task: applying edits in a temporally consistent manner to all frames remains a key challenge. In this talk, I’ll present a novel method that tackles this challenge by decomposing an input video into a set of layered 2D atlases, each providing a unified representation of an object/background over the entire vid...

Incorporating Time into Word Representations
Guy Rosin
Sunday, 09.01.2022, 14:30
Zoom Lecture: 99189612386
Our world is constantly evolving, and so is the content on the web. Consequently, our languages, often said to mirror the world, are dynamic in nature. However, most current language representations are static and cannot adapt to changes over time. New words and semantic evolution have been shown to pose a crucial challenge in many Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval tasks, leading to a significant performance drop for modern language models. In this the...

Incentive-Aligned Strategic Classification
Sagi Levanon
Sunday, 09.01.2022, 11:30
Zoom Lecture: 74825775795
Predictive machine learning tools are increasingly being used to inform decisions regarding humans. When human users stand to gain from certain predictive outcomes, they may be prone to act strategically to improve those outcomes. We argue that in many realistic scenarios the system and its users are in fact aligned in their goals. In this work, we give concrete real-world examples for such environments and demonstrate using a series of experiments that they are incent...

CS LECTURE: Sublinear-time Graph Algorithms: Motif Counting and Uniform Sampling
Talya Eden (MIT and Boston University)
Sunday, 09.01.2022, 10:30
Room 012 Taub Bld (Learning Center Auditorium)
In this talk I will survey recent developments in approximate subgraph-counting and subgraph-sampling in sublinear-time. Counting and sampling small subgraphs (aka motifs) are two of the most basic primitives in graph analysis, and have been studied extensively, both in theory and in practice. In my talk, I will present the sublinear-time computational model, where access to the input graph is given only through queries, and will explain some of the concepts that underlie my resul...

Practical WEB Development Workshop: To Code of Not to Code
Wednesday, 05.01.2022, 18:30
Zoom Event: Registration
You are invited to a practical web development workshop that will include an overview of the latest technologies of web application development and practical practice with a demonstration, with the help of Uri Shaked, Voiding warranties at Wokwi.com. The workshop will take place on Wednesday, January 5, 18:30, in a zoom session, and it is optional but not required to be familiar with at least one programming language such as JavaScript, React, Next.js, as well as installation o...

Estimating NLP Domain Adaptation Performance Using Model Causal Analysis
Boaz Ben-Dov
Tuesday, 04.01.2022, 14:30
Zoom Lecture: 97209155707
Domain adaptation setups were not all born equal, and some domains are easier to adapt to and from than others. This talk will show and attempt to estimate the difficulty (or ease) of adapting between different domains, based on the causal effect of certain features in the data on the adapting model’s predictions. This question is relevant in many real-life scenarios where computational resources exist in relative abundance, while labeling and data-gathering is time-consumin...

Pixel Club: Computational Imagingfor Sensing High-speed Phenomena
Mark Sheinin (Carnegie Mellon University)
Tuesday, 04.01.2022, 13:30
Zoom Lecture: 9245008892
Despite recent advances in sensor technology, capturing high-speed video at high-spatial resolutionsremains a challenge. This is because, in a conventional camera, the available bandwidth limits either the maximum sampling frequency or thecaptured spatial resolution. In this talk, I am going to cover our recent works that use computational imaging to allow high-speed high-resolution imagingunder certain conditions. First I will describe Diffraction Line Imaging, a novel imaging pr...

CS LECTURE: Informed Data Science