How To Deal with Database Reconstruction Attacks

March 9, 2024

I have been thinking about data security issues, in particular database-reconstruction attacks. To quote Wikipedia, a reconstruction attack is any method for partially reconstructing a private database from public aggregate information. The question I am specifically interested in is this: Can an attacker with general interactive query access to a dataset recover a piece of … More How To Deal with Database Reconstruction Attacks

Influence Flower

December 25, 2023

Regular users of arXiv.org may have noticed that on every paper’s page, under the Related Papers tab, one can now find the paper’s Influence Flower, which is a nice way to visualise citation influences among academic entities, including papers, authors, institutions, and research topics. The following, for example, are the author-centric and venue-centric influence flowers … More Influence Flower

Dynamic Knowledge Injection for AIXI Agents

December 9, 2023

My phd student just got a new paper accepted at the upcoming AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Here’s the abstract of the paper: Prior approximations of AIXI, a Bayesian optimality notion for general reinforcement learning, can only approximate AIXI’s Bayesian environment model using an a-priori defined set of models. This is a fundamental source of … More Dynamic Knowledge Injection for AIXI Agents

Variational Inference for Scalable 3D Object-centric Learning

October 1, 2023

My phd student has just released a paper on 3D Object-Centric Learning on arXiv. I am pretty proud of the work, although I really only understand around 40% of it. Here’s the abstract: We tackle the task of scalable unsupervised object-centric representation learning on 3D scenes. Existing approaches to object-centric representation learning show limitations in … More Variational Inference for Scalable 3D Object-centric Learning

A Simple Definition of Artificial Intelligence

August 6, 2023

There are many different definitions of Artificial Intelligence in the literature, all are suggestive and insightful. However, at the end of the day, I think there is really one simple enough to be understood and formalised rigorously. This is John McCarthy’s original definition of AI from 1955: “the science and engineering of making intelligent machines”. … More A Simple Definition of Artificial Intelligence

FinTracer and Friends

June 25, 2023

About 5 years ago, Tania Churchill and I assembled a team of researchers and engineers across AUSTRAC and ANU to work on privacy technologies for detecting criminal activities across the financial system, funded by the Fintel Alliance Expansion budget measure, the Investigative Analytics NPP (led by CSIRO’s Data61), and an ANU Translational Fellowship. The overall … More FinTracer and Friends

Split Count and Share: A Differentially Private Set Intersection Cardinality Algorithm

June 11, 2023

My colleagues Mike Purcell, Kelvin Yang Li and I have a new paper on differentially private set intersection cardinality algorithm accepted at this year’s Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence conference. Here is the abstract:We describe a simple two-party protocol in which each party contributes a set as input. The output of the protocol is an estimate … More Split Count and Share: A Differentially Private Set Intersection Cardinality Algorithm

A Map of Machine Learning Principles and Algorithms

April 25, 2023

Here is my attempt to map out the major classes of algorithms in Machine Learning, organised around the associated induction principles and learning theory. The usual caveats apply around this being biased towards my own experience. At the highest level, we can distinguish between the Passive and Active learning settings. In the passive case, the … More A Map of Machine Learning Principles and Algorithms

My Leadership Brand

March 25, 2023

I was recently asked to speak about my leadership brand, a topic I hadn’t seriously thought about ever, until now. So what is my brand. Here are a few things that I know: So I think my leadership brand is the rational leader who understands how things work, and who seeks to inspire his people … More My Leadership Brand