תמונות מהכנס ניתן לראות באתר הפייסבוק של IAP

~~(The talk will be given in English)

Prof. Gal Kaminka
Bar Ilan University
Wednesday, May 20th, 2015
15:15 - 16:15
Room 011, Kitot Bldg., Faculty of Engineering
No robot is an island, no team an archipelago
Abstract
We live in opportune times. The centuries-old dreams of creating intelligent, programmable automatons—robots—are becoming reality. Recent years are seeing dramatically growing interest in robotics, by scientists and practitioners alike. Robots—from the molecular scale to tank-size—seem to appear everywhere: in production lines, in the battlefield, in hospitals, in warehouses, in homes, in fields; on the ground, on water, and in the air.

In this talk, I argue that to accelerate and maximize the impact of robotics, robots should operate in teams, rather than in isolation. Moreover, I argue that effective robot teams must dynamically adjust their teamwork, instead of relying on rigid pre-planned coordination schemes. This is not a mere philosophical argument: I will present algorithms, data structures, and computational techniques for facilitating such teamwork, and discuss analytical guarantees and empirical results that demonstrate the effectiveness of these contributions in a variety of cooperative robot teams, from the molecular to the vehicle scale; robot teams which move in formations, explore urban areas, play soccer, and patrol Israel's borders.

As a final note, I will also argue that what is true for robots, is true for roboticists. Accelerating the impact of robotics requires leaving behind rigid disciplinary bounds and pre-established division of labor within academic circles and in practice. Instead, roboticists should embrace multi-discplinary collaborations, opening up to biology, psychology, economics, and sociology as sources of inspiration and targets of influence.

About the speaker:
Gal A. Kaminka is a professor at the computer science department and the brain sciences research center, at Bar Ilan University (Israel), where he chairs the Bar Ilan University Robotics Consortium, and his MAVERICK research group. His research expertise includes multi-agent and multi-robot systems, teamwork and coordination, behavior and plan recognition, and modeling social behavior. He received his PhD from the University of Southern California (2000), spent time as a post-doctorate fellow at Carnegie Mellon University (until 2002), and a year as a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (2012).  Prof. Kaminka was awarded an IBM faculty award and top places at international robotics competitions. He served as the program chair of the 2008 Israeli Conference on Robotics, and the program co-chair of the 2010 Int'l Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS). He has served on the international executive bodies of IFAAMAS (International Foundation of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems), the RoboCup Federation, and AAAI (Association for Advancement of Artificial Intelligence). He is the author or co-author of over 150 publications and 7 patents. He is the 2013 recipient of the Israeli national Landau Prize in exact sciences.

~~(The talk will be given in English)

Yan Michalevsky
Stanford University
Wednesday, May 13th, 2015
15:00 - 16:00
Room 011, Kitot Bldg., Faculty of Engineering
Side-channel attacks on mobile devices
Abstract
Modern smartphones are loaded with sensors that measure a lot of information about the environment: a compass, an accelerometer, a GPS receiver, a microphone, an ampere-meter, etc. Some sensors, like the GPS receiver and microphone, are protected, as applications must request special permissions to read data from them. Other sensors, like the accelerometer and ampere-meter, are considered innocuous and can be read by any application without special permissions.
In a sequence of recent papers we show that smartphone sensors can be abused: malicious applications can use innocuous sensors for unintended purposes.  We give three illustrative examples: access to the accelerometer results in a device fingerprint that is strongly bound to the phone, access to the gyro sensor enables an application without privileges to eavesdrop on acoustic signals, including speech, in the vicinity of the phone. Access to the ampere-meter reveals information about the phone’s past and present locations.
We suggest defenses specific to these particular attacks, as well as more general principles for designing a more secure ecosystem of smart devices.

Bio
Yan is a PhD student at Stanford University, advised by Dan Boneh. He recently focused on mobile security and privacy. His works on side-channel attacks on mobile devices were presented at Usenix and BlackHat security conferences.
Previously, he held several positions in industry as a team manager, independent contractor, and software architect and developer, mostly in the fields of networks, embedded software and security. He holds a BSc in Electrical Engineering from the Technion, and an MS in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.