
I am a research scientist at Google Brain working at the intersection of machine learning and computer security. My most recent line of work studies properties of neural networks from an adversarial perspective. I received my Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 2018, and my B.A. in computer science and mathematics (also from UC Berkeley) in 2013.
Generally, I am interested in developing attacks on machine learning systems; most of my work develops attacks demonstrating security and privacy risks of these systems. I have received best paper awards at ICML and IEEE S&P, and my work has been featured in the New York Times, the BBC, Nature Magazine, Science Magazine, Wired, and Popular Science.
Previously I interned at Google Brain, evaluating the privacy of machine learning; Intel, evaluating Control-Flow Enforcement Technology (CET); and Matasano Security, doing security testing and designing an embedded security CTF.
A complete list of my publications are online, along with some of my code, and some extra writings.
Recent Work
Last year I made a doom clone in JavaScript. Until recently all content on this website was research, and while writing papers can be fun Who are we kidding? Writing is never fun. But it's the cost of admission when doing research, which definitely is. , sometimes you just need to blow off a little steam. The entire game fits in 13k---the 3d renderer, shadow mapper, game engine, levels, enemies, and music. The post talks about the process of designing the game and how to make it all happen under the constraints.
At CAMLIS 2024 I gave a talk covering what it means to evaluate adversarial robustness. This is a much higher-level talk for an audience that isn't deeply familiar with the area of adversarial machine learning research. (For a more technical version of this talk, see my recent USENIX Security invited talk that discusses these same topics in more depth.) The talk covers what adversarial examples are, how to generate them, how to (try to) defend against them, and finally what the future may hold.