Events

Upcoming events

Efficient Request Isolation in Function-as-a-Service

Mohamed Alzayat Max Planck Institute for Software Systems
08 Mar 2024, 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
Saarbrücken building E1 5, room 002
SWS Student Defense Talks - Thesis Defense
As cloud applications become increasingly event-driven, Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) is emerging as an important abstraction. FaaS allows tenants to state their application logic as stateless functions without managing the underlying infrastructure that runs and scales their applications.

FaaS providers ensure the confidentiality of tenants’ data, to a limited extent, by isolating function instances from one another. However, for performance considerations, the same degree of isolation does not apply to sequential requests activating the same function instance. ...
As cloud applications become increasingly event-driven, Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) is emerging as an important abstraction. FaaS allows tenants to state their application logic as stateless functions without managing the underlying infrastructure that runs and scales their applications.

FaaS providers ensure the confidentiality of tenants’ data, to a limited extent, by isolating function instances from one another. However, for performance considerations, the same degree of isolation does not apply to sequential requests activating the same function instance. This compromise can lead to confidentiality breaches since bugs in a function implementation or its dependencies may retain state and leak data across activations. Moreover, platform optimizations that assume function statelessness may introduce unexpected behavior if the function retains state, jeopardizing correctness.

This dissertation presents two complementary systems: Groundhog and CtxTainter. Groundhog is a black-box and programming-language-agnostic solution that enforces confidentiality by efficiently rolling back changes to a function’s state after each function activation, effectively enforcing statelessness by breaking all data flows at the request boundary. CtxTainter is a development-phase dynamic data flow analysis tool that detects data flows that violate the statelessness assumption and reports them to the developer for reviewing and fixing.
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Digital Safety and Security for Survivors of Technology-Mediated Harms

Emily Tseng Cornell University
11 Mar 2024, 10:00 am - 11:00 am
Saarbrücken building E1 5, room 002
CIS@MPG Colloquium
Platforms, devices, and algorithms are increasingly weaponized to control and harass the most vulnerable among us. Some of these harms occur at the individual and interpersonal level: for example, abusers in intimate partner violence (IPV) use smartphones and social media to surveil and stalk their victims. Others are more subtle, at the level of social structure: for example, in organizations, workplace technologies can inadvertently scaffold exploitative labor practices. This talk will discuss my research (1) investigating these harms via online measurement studies, ...
Platforms, devices, and algorithms are increasingly weaponized to control and harass the most vulnerable among us. Some of these harms occur at the individual and interpersonal level: for example, abusers in intimate partner violence (IPV) use smartphones and social media to surveil and stalk their victims. Others are more subtle, at the level of social structure: for example, in organizations, workplace technologies can inadvertently scaffold exploitative labor practices. This talk will discuss my research (1) investigating these harms via online measurement studies, (2) building interventions to directly assist survivors with their security and privacy; and (3) instrumenting these interventions, to enable scientific research into new types of harms as attackers and technologies evolve. I will close by sharing my vision for centering inclusion and equity in digital safety, security and privacy, towards brighter technological futures for us all.
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Expanding the Horizons of Finite-Precision Analysis

Debasmita Lohar Max Planck Institute for Software Systems
27 Mar 2024, 2:45 pm - 3:45 pm
Saarbrücken building E1 5, room 029
SWS Student Defense Talks - Thesis Defense
Finite-precision programs, prevalent in embedded systems, scientific computing, and machine learning, inherently introduce numerical uncertainties stemming from noises in the inputs and finite-precision errors. Furthermore, implementing these programs on hardware necessitates a trade-off between accuracy and efficiency. Therefore, it is crucial to ensure that numerical uncertainties remain acceptably small and to optimize implementations for accurate results tailored to specific applications. Existing analysis and optimization techniques for finite-precision programs face challenges in scalability and applicability to real-world scenarios. ...
Finite-precision programs, prevalent in embedded systems, scientific computing, and machine learning, inherently introduce numerical uncertainties stemming from noises in the inputs and finite-precision errors. Furthermore, implementing these programs on hardware necessitates a trade-off between accuracy and efficiency. Therefore, it is crucial to ensure that numerical uncertainties remain acceptably small and to optimize implementations for accurate results tailored to specific applications. Existing analysis and optimization techniques for finite-precision programs face challenges in scalability and applicability to real-world scenarios. In this work, we expand the individual capabilities of these techniques by capturing the impact of uncertain inputs on discrete decisions and roundoff errors, by scaling floating-point verification for larger programs, and by specializing optimization for feed-forward deep neural networks.
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Recent events

Shaping Experience and Expression by Designing Sensorimotor Contingencies

Paul Strohmeier MPI-INF - D4
06 Mar 2024, 12:15 pm - 1:15 pm
Saarbrücken building E1 5, room 002
Joint Lecture Series
Our experience of the world is mediated by a continuous feedback loop between motor activity and sensory stimuli. Manipulating these sensorimotor loops offers a powerful means to influence user experience. Such loops, updating in milliseconds, demand devices with higher temporal resolution than those typically used in conventional human-computer interaction (HCI). In this talk, I will show how tapping into sensorimotor loops with tactile feedback allows us to alter our experience of the physical world and our own bodily sensations. ...
Our experience of the world is mediated by a continuous feedback loop between motor activity and sensory stimuli. Manipulating these sensorimotor loops offers a powerful means to influence user experience. Such loops, updating in milliseconds, demand devices with higher temporal resolution than those typically used in conventional human-computer interaction (HCI). In this talk, I will show how tapping into sensorimotor loops with tactile feedback allows us to alter our experience of the physical world and our own bodily sensations. Additionally, I will discuss how we can go beyond simply augmenting experience to enhancing human expression through sensorimotor augmentation.
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Hardware and Software Codesign

Marcus Pirron Max Planck Institute for Software Systems
05 Mar 2024, 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
Kaiserslautern building G26, room 111
SWS Student Defense Talks - Thesis Defense
Modern robotic applications consist of a variety of robotic systems that work together to achieve complex tasks. Programming these applications draws from multiple fields of knowledge and typically involves low-level imperative programming languages that provide little to no support for abstraction or reasoning. We present a unifying programming model, ranging from automated controller synthesis for individual robots to a compositional reasoning framework for inter-robot coordination. We provide novel methods on the topics of control and planning of modular robots, ...
Modern robotic applications consist of a variety of robotic systems that work together to achieve complex tasks. Programming these applications draws from multiple fields of knowledge and typically involves low-level imperative programming languages that provide little to no support for abstraction or reasoning. We present a unifying programming model, ranging from automated controller synthesis for individual robots to a compositional reasoning framework for inter-robot coordination. We provide novel methods on the topics of control and planning of modular robots, making contributions in three main areas: controller synthesis, concurrent systems, and verification. Our method synthesizes control code for serial and parallel manipulators and leverages physical properties to synthesize sensing abilities. This allows us to determine parts of the system's state that previously remained unmeasured. Our synthesized controllers are robust; we are able to detect and isolate faulty parts of the system, find alternatives, and ensure continued operation. On the concurrent systems side, we deal with dynamic controllers affecting the physical state, geometric constraints on components, and synchronization between processes. We provide a programming model for robotics applications that consists of assemblies of robotic components together with a run-time and a verifier. Our model combines message-passing concurrent processes with motion primitives and explicit modeling of geometric frame shifts, allowing us to create composite robotic systems for performing tasks that are unachievable for individual systems. We provide a verification algorithm based on model checking and SMT solvers that statically verifies concurrency-related properties (e.g. absence of deadlocks) and geometric invariants (e.g. collision-free motions). Our method ensures that jointly executed actions at end-points are communication-safe and deadlock-free, providing a compositional verification methodology for assemblies of robotic components with respect to concurrency and dynamic invariants. Our results indicate the efficiency of our novel approach and provide the foundation of compositional reasoning of robotic systems.
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Beyond the Search Bar in Human-AI Interactions: Augmenting Discovery, Synthesis, and Creativity With User-Generated Context

Srishti Palani University of California, San Diego
05 Mar 2024, 10:00 am - 11:00 am
Kaiserslautern building G26, room 111
CIS@MPG Colloquium
Searching and exploring information online is integral to everyday life, shaping how we learn, work, and create. As the Web paradigm evolves to include foundational AI models and beyond, we are experiencing a shift in how we search and work. With this transformation in human-AI interaction, it is important to investigate how we might present the user with the right information in the right context, the right representation, and at the right time. In this talk, ...
Searching and exploring information online is integral to everyday life, shaping how we learn, work, and create. As the Web paradigm evolves to include foundational AI models and beyond, we are experiencing a shift in how we search and work. With this transformation in human-AI interaction, it is important to investigate how we might present the user with the right information in the right context, the right representation, and at the right time. In this talk, I will share how I have explored these questions in the context of complex critical information work (such as knowledge discovery, synthesis, and creativity). I present insights about user behaviors and challenges from mixed-method studies observing how people conduct this work using today’s tools. Then, I present novel AI-powered tools and techniques that augment these cognitive processes by mining rich contextual signals from unstructured user-generated artifacts. By deepening our understanding of human cognition and behavior and building tools that understand user contexts more meaningfully, I envision a future where human-AI interactions are more personalized, context-aware, cognitively-convivial, and truly collaborative.
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