Like many difficult cyber security problems, prompt-injection attacks is likely to become an ongoing issue that shifts and turns with the continual discovery of new attacks and new defences going forward. Instead of responding in natural language given a prompt, the best current defence I know involves always generating code, say, in a safe interpreted … More Thoughts on Prompt Injection Attacks
To support public-service agencies in the implementation of their own responsible use of AI policies, the Australian Government’s Digital Transformation Agency (DTA) has made publicly available its AI Fundamentals training course in the form of a SCORM package, a commonly used technical standard for putting together content for Learning Management Systems (LMS). The DTA training … More Customising the Australian Government’s AI Fundamentals Training Course
Differential Privacy (DP) is one of the most widely adopted formal model of privacy protection but its semantics, especially in the presence of correlated data and in the adversarial interactive setting, is still not broadly understood among data science practitioners. In this paper, we first look at how DP originated from research on database-reconstruction attacks … More On the Semantics of Differential Privacy and Its Responsible Use
Cyber security and data security are closely related concepts that operate at different levels and provide different safeguards. Cyber security is primarily about controlling access to systems and data through different security protection mechanisms, from the physical network layer all the way to the application layer. These security mechanisms come primarily in the form of … More Data Security vs Cyber Security
Modern competitive analysis started in the 1930’s with the introduction of the Structural-Conduct-Performance (SCP) paradigm (shown in Figure 1 below) that was used to analyse the causal dynamics of Industrial Organisation, the field of study concerned to a large extent with how public policy can limit monopoly power. The SCP paradigm has since evolved into … More Competitive Strategies: Structures and Power
A colleague and I have just released on arXiv a paper titled “Enabling Secure and Ephemeral AI Workloads in Data Mesh Environments”. The key innovation is in pushing the now well-established idea of minimal immutable data structures up and down the software infrastructure stack a bit further than what others have done, resulting in a … More Secure and Ephemeral AI Workloads in Data Mesh Environments
Of the many questions we wish to answer using LLMs, it can be useful to distinguish between puzzles and mysteries. As Gregory Teverton explained in his many articles, a puzzle is a problem that has a definite and verifiable answer, but a mystery is one that “poses a question that has no definitive answer because … More Puzzles and Mysteries in Generative AI
I recently released on arXiv a new version of the paper The Problem of Social Cost in Multi-Agent General Reinforcement Learning: Survey and Synthesis, which can be found at https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.02091 The new version has These are all non-trivial extensions of the paper that build on recent new results in different fields and they are worth … More Update on Social Cost of Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Paper
I wrote the following comments very quickly on LinkedIn about 10 days ago in the middle of the DeepSeek frenzy, and the post turned out to be my second most-read post ever and people continues to look at it. I think the comments are holding up well so I am sharing them here as well, … More DeepSeek and All That
There’s been a lot written about Fourier Transforms over the years. From a physics perspective, I would recommend the Harmonics chapter in the Feynman Lectures on Physics. I also found Elan Ness-Cohn’s visual explanation of Fourier Transforms really satisfying. In the notes linked below, I have tried to give, in 5 short pages, the intuition … More Algebraic Intuitions behind Fourier Transforms
Mental Models 4 Life 