Programmable Spectrometry -- Per-pixel Classification of Materials using Learned Spectral Filters

Many materials have distinct spectral profiles. This facilitates estimation of the material composition of a scene at each pixel by first acquiring its hyperspectral image, and subsequently filtering it using a bank of spectral profiles. This process is inherently wasteful since only a set of linear projections of the acquired measurements contribute to the classification task. We propose a novel programmable camera that is capable of producing images of a scene with an arbitrary spectral filter. We use this camera to optically implement the spectral filtering of the scene's hyperspectral image with the bank of spectral profiles needed to perform per-pixel material classification. This provides gains both in terms of acquisition speed --- since only the relevant measurements are acquired --- and in signal-to-noise ratio --- since we invariably avoid narrowband filters that are light inefficient. Given training data, we use a range of classical and modern techniques including SVMs and neural networks to identify the bank of spectral profiles that facilitate material classification. We verify the method in simulations on standard datasets as well as real data using a lab prototype of the camera

Improving Distributed Gradient Descent Using Reed-Solomon Codes

Today's massively-sized datasets have made it necessary to often perform computations on them in a distributed manner. In principle, a computational task is divided into subtasks which are distributed over a cluster operated by a taskmaster. One issue faced in practice is the delay incurred due to the presence of slow machines, known as \emph{stragglers}. Several schemes, including those based on replication, have been proposed in the literature to mitigate the effects of stragglers and more recently, those inspired by coding theory have begun to gain traction. In this work, we consider a distributed gradient descent setting suitable for a wide class of machine learning problems. We adapt the framework of Tandon et al. (arXiv:1612.03301) and present a deterministic scheme that, for a prescribed per-machine computational effort, recovers the gradient from the least number of machines $f$ theoretically permissible, via an $O(f^2)$ decoding algorithm. We also provide a theoretical delay model which can be used to minimize the expected waiting time per computation by optimally choosing the parameters of the scheme. Finally, we supplement our theoretical findings with numerical results that demonstrate the efficacy of the method and its advantages over competing schemes

Lagrange Coded Computing: Optimal Design for Resiliency, Security and Privacy

We consider a scenario involving computations over a massive dataset stored distributedly across multiple workers, which is at the core of distributed learning algorithms. We propose Lagrange Coded Computing (LCC), a new framework to simultaneously provide (1) resiliency against stragglers that may prolong computations; (2) security against Byzantine (or malicious) workers that deliberately modify the computation for their benefit; and (3) (information-theoretic) privacy of the dataset amidst possible collusion of workers. LCC, which leverages the well-known Lagrange polynomial to create computation redundancy in a novel coded form across workers, can be applied to any computation scenario in which the function of interest is an arbitrary multivariate polynomial of the input dataset, hence covering many computations of interest in machine learning. LCC significantly generalizes prior works to go beyond linear computations. It also enables secure and private computing in distributed settings, improving the computation and communication efficiency of the state-of-the-art. Furthermore, we prove the optimality of LCC by showing that it achieves the optimal tradeoff between resiliency, security, and privacy, i.e., in terms of tolerating the maximum number of stragglers and adversaries, and providing data privacy against the maximum number of colluding workers. Finally, we show via experiments on Amazon EC2 that LCC speeds up the conventional uncoded implementation of distributed least-squares linear regression by up to $13.43\times$, and also achieves a $2.36\times$-$12.65\times$ speedup over the state-of-the-art straggler mitigation strategies

SQL Injection Detection Using Machine Learning Techniques and Multiple Data Sources

SQL Injection continues to be one of the most damaging security exploits in terms of personal information exposure as well as monetary loss. Injection attacks are the number one vulnerability in the most recent OWASP Top 10 report, and the number of these attacks continues to increase. Traditional defense strategies often involve static, signature-based IDS (Intrusion Detection System) rules which are mostly effective only against previously observed attacks but not unknown, or zero-day, attacks. Much current research involves the use of machine learning techniques, which are able to detect unknown attacks, but depending on the algorithm can be costly in terms of performance. In addition, most current intrusion detection strategies involve collection of traffic coming into the web application either from a network device or from the web application host, while other strategies collect data from the database server logs. In this project, we are collecting traffic from two points: the web application host, and a Datiphy appliance node located between the webapp host and the associated MySQL database server. In our analysis of these two datasets, and another dataset that is correlated between the two, we have been able to demonstrate that accuracy obtained with the correlated dataset using algorithms such as rule-based and decision tree are nearly the same as those with a neural network algorithm, but with greatly improved performance

DeepMarks: A Digital Fingerprinting Framework for Deep Neural Networks

This paper proposes DeepMarks, a novel end-to-end framework for systematic fingerprinting in the context of Deep Learning (DL). Remarkable progress has been made in the area of deep learning. Sharing the trained DL models has become a trend that is ubiquitous in various fields ranging from biomedical diagnosis to stock prediction. As the availability and popularity of pre-trained models are increasing, it is critical to protect the Intellectual Property (IP) of the model owner. DeepMarks introduces the first fingerprinting methodology that enables the model owner to embed unique fingerprints within the parameters (weights) of her model and later identify undesired usages of her distributed models. The proposed framework embeds the fingerprints in the Probability Density Function (pdf) of trainable weights by leveraging the extra capacity available in contemporary DL models. DeepMarks is robust against fingerprints collusion as well as network transformation attacks, including model compression and model fine-tuning. Extensive proof-of-concept evaluations on MNIST and CIFAR10 datasets, as well as a wide variety of deep neural networks architectures such as Wide Residual Networks (WRNs) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), corroborate the effectiveness and robustness of DeepMarks framework