4 research outputs found
Malicious Network Traffic Detection via Deep Learning: An Information Theoretic View
The attention that deep learning has garnered from the academic community and
industry continues to grow year over year, and it has been said that we are in
a new golden age of artificial intelligence research. However, neural networks
are still often seen as a "black box" where learning occurs but cannot be
understood in a human-interpretable way. Since these machine learning systems
are increasingly being adopted in security contexts, it is important to explore
these interpretations. We consider an Android malware traffic dataset for
approaching this problem. Then, using the information plane, we explore how
homeomorphism affects learned representation of the data and the invariance of
the mutual information captured by the parameters on that data. We empirically
validate these results, using accuracy as a second measure of similarity of
learned representations.
Our results suggest that although the details of learned representations and
the specific coordinate system defined over the manifold of all parameters
differ slightly, the functional approximations are the same. Furthermore, our
results show that since mutual information remains invariant under
homeomorphism, only feature engineering methods that alter the entropy of the
dataset will change the outcome of the neural network. This means that for some
datasets and tasks, neural networks require meaningful, human-driven feature
engineering or changes in architecture to provide enough information for the
neural network to generate a sufficient statistic. Applying our results can
serve to guide analysis methods for machine learning engineers and suggests
that neural networks that can exploit the convolution theorem are equally
accurate as standard convolutional neural networks, and can be more
computationally efficient
The State of AI Ethics Report (June 2020)
These past few months have been especially challenging, and the deployment of technology in ways hitherto untested at an unrivalled pace has left the internet and technology watchers aghast. Artificial intelligence has become the byword for technological progress and is being used in everything from helping us combat the COVID-19 pandemic to nudging our attention in different directions as we all spend increasingly larger amounts of time online. It has never been more important that we keep a sharp eye out on the development of this field and how it is shaping our society and interactions with each other. With this inaugural edition of the State of AI Ethics we hope to bring forward the most important developments that caught our attention at the Montreal AI Ethics Institute this past quarter. Our goal is to help you navigate this ever-evolving field swiftly and allow you and your organization to make informed decisions. This pulse-check for the state of discourse, research, and development is geared towards researchers and practitioners alike who are making decisions on behalf of their organizations in considering the societal impacts of AI-enabled solutions. We cover a wide set of areas in this report spanning Agency and Responsibility, Security and Risk, Disinformation, Jobs and Labor, the Future of AI Ethics, and more. Our staff has worked tirelessly over the past quarter surfacing signal from the noise so that you are equipped with the right tools and knowledge to confidently tread this complex yet consequential domain