Protecting health data privacy
05/01/19 — Artificial intelligence can identify individuals by correlating step data from activity trackers and smartphones with demographic data.
Security & privacy
How malevolent machine learning could derail AI
03/26/19 MIT Technology Review — Berkeley Engineering AI security expert Dawn Song warns that “adversarial machine learning” could be used to reverse-engineer systems - including those used in defense.
Activism 2.0: Coding against sex trafficking
01/30/19 — UC Berkeley's ongoing video series on the intersection of social activism and technology profiles recent CS doctoral graduate Rebecca Sorla Portnoff, who uses her computer security know-how to help catch sex traffickers.
AI could identify you and your health history from your step tracker
01/29/19 USA Today — Manufacturers say data stripped of identifying information is no privacy risk. But UC Berkeley's Anil Aswani and UCSF's Yoshimi Fukuoka found that artificial intelligence can overcome that. Time to update health privacy laws.
Artificial intelligence opens health data privacy to attack
12/21/18 — Current privacy laws and regulations are nowhere near sufficient to keep an individual's health data private in the face of advances in artificial intelligence, according to a new study from IEOR professor Anil Aswani and his team.
Fighting fake news
11/14/18 — Berkeley students have created SurfSafe, a machine learning tool that identifies when an online photo has been doctored.
Berkeley researchers to help develop trustworthy machine learning systems
10/24/18 — Berkeley engineers, led by computer sciences professor Dawn Song, are part of the new Center for Trustworthy Machine Learning funded by the National Science Foundation. The NSF center, led by Pennsylvania State University and announced today, will focus on developing secure systems in the era of machine learning models. The center will receive $10 million over five years.
The latest course catalog trend? Blockchain 101
09/19/18 Wired — From a course teaching students to think like blockchain entrepreneurs to "collider sprints" at the Sutardja Center's Blockchain Lab, Berkeley is at the forefront of universities incorporating this multidisciplinary technology into the curriculum.
Calling out fake photos on the web
08/21/18 Wired — Fake photos are the bane of internet junkies. SurfSafe, a browser plugin from RoBhat Labs (computer science undergrads Ash Bhat and Rohan Phadte), can warn users that they're viewing a Photoshopped fake in real time - like an antivirus for photos.
‘Location history’ off? Google’s still tracking you
08/17/18 AP News — Computer science graduate student K. Shankari tipped the Associated Press off to the persistence of Google's movement tracking, even for users who explicitly tell the company not to do so.
Q+A on nuclear nonproliferation
06/01/18 — Bethany Lyles Goldblum is working on new technologies to aid in the detection of nuclear threats.
Alexa and Siri can hear this hidden command. You can’t
05/10/18 New York Times — EECS Ph.D. candidate Nicholas Carlini and other Berkeley cybersecurity researchers have been embedding commands into music and spoken text that human listeners can't hear but smart devices can. Carlini hopes to secure AI systems against attacks that he assumes "malicious people" are already working on.
Scarred by attack, student entrepreneurs fight global terror
04/30/18 — In the wake of the 2016 terrorist attack in Nice, France, that claimed the life of a classmate, Berkeley students in the European Innovation Academy technology entrepreneurship program have embarked on a new mission - fighting global terrorism through startups that are gaining traction far beyond campus.
Q&A with Barbara Simons
03/16/18 — Barbara Simons, a founding member of Women in Computer Science and Engineering (which is celebrating its 40th anniversary), has been sounding the alarm about the potential pitfalls of internet and electronic voting for more than a decade.
Why AI researchers should be more paranoid
02/23/18 Wired — A new report highlights risks of artificial intelligence, such as malicious self-driving cars or assassin robots. EECS professor Ion Stoica, who recently surveyed technical challenges in AI, said Berkeley is already trying to expose students flocking to the field to concerns over AI safety and security.
Security for data analytics: Handling the two-edged sword
02/16/18 Berkeley Research — Data protocols meant to ensure privacy can end up blocking valuable, even life-saving analysis of that data. Now EECS researchers are trying a new approach that allows organizations to follow tight data security and privacy policies while enabling flexible data analysis.
Cryptocurrencies come to campus
02/09/18 New York Times — UC Berkeley is one of several institutions rushing to add courses about Bitcoin, blockchain and other elements of virtual currency to the curriculum. EECS professor Dawn Song is co-teaching one such course to a standing-room-only audience of engineering, business and law students.
At Berkeley, ‘ethical hackers’ learn to wage cyberwar
11/29/17 New Yorker — EECS professor Doug Tygar is teaching a new generation of cyber security researchers to prevent cyberwar attacks by forensically examining them, and even sometimes mounting "ethical hacking" schemes of their own.
Professor’s eerie lethal drone video goes viral
11/20/17 SF Chronicle — "Slaughterbots," a not-so-futuristic video warning against the development of autonomous weapons, has gone viral. Co-created by EECS professor Stuart Russell and the Future of Life Institute, it was released this week at the United Nations Convention on Conventional Weapons in Geneva.
Berkeley offers new cybersecurity degree
11/15/17 CLTC — Applications are being accepted for a new, online master's of information and cybersecurity program at UC Berkeley's School of Information, in collaboration with the College of Engineering and the I-School's Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity.