Suggestions
Alessandro Bruni
Associate Professor at IT-Universitetet i København
Alessandro Bruni is a highly accomplished individual with a strong background in computer science. He obtained his Master of Science (M.S.) in Computer Science from both Università degli Studi di Padova in Italy and the University of California, Santa Cruz in the United States. Alessandro has held various academic and professional roles, including being an Associate Professor, Assistant Professor, and Postdoc at IT-Universitetet i København. Prior to his academic positions, he worked as a Garbage Collector at Prolog Development Center A/S and gained his PhD from the Technical University of Denmark. Additionally, he has experience as a Research Engineer at SIAV and as a Software Engineer at XtraGroove srl.
Highlights
We are looking for an outstanding PhD candidate to work on formal verification of AI interfaces, advised by Ekaterina Komendantskaya, Reynald Affeldt and myself, based at the University of Southampton, with collaborative visits at National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) and the IT-Universitetet i København. If you are such candidate, please get in touch with Ekaterina Komendantskaya. Here are the details:
Advisors: Ekaterina Komendantskaya (Southampton University, UK), Alessandro Bruni (IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark), Reynald Affeldt (AIST, Japan) Start Date: As soon as the right candidate is found Location: Southampton University, UK; with collaborative visits involving researchers at AIST, Japan and IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Description: The field of computing is facing a conundrum caused by a clash in two opposing trends: on the one hand, the growth and proliferation of machine learning (ML) in software, and on the other hand, ever-growing concerns that, with ML models being a black-box technology, the safety, security and explainability of software that uses ML diminish. To address these concerns, we need tools and languages that can serve as safe interfaces to ML components. Such safe ML interfaces will allow to specify the desired properties of ML models, train ML models to satisfy such properties, and verify that these desired properties do in fact hold in the final artifact. For example, one language that supports the safe ML interfaces approach is the Haskell DSL Vehicle [1]; and one iconic application for safe ML interfaces is in verifying autonomous car controllers [1]. At the moment, we use the Coq proof assistant and the recent MathComp-Analysis library to study the formalization of Differentiable Logics that allow to specify certain safety properties of ML models, and then compile them down into loss functions for training. We are looking for a PhD applicant with keen interest in mathematics, logic and/or Coq programming to join this team, to extend the initial study of [2] to a richer language such as [1]. The conditions of this PhD funding come with no restrictions on nationality but assume that a successful PhD candidate will have a competitive CV. Please forward this advertisement to any interested individuals, and address any questions to: [email protected] [1] Matthew L. Daggitt, Wen Kokke, Robert Atkey, Natalia Slusarz, Luca Arnaboldi, Ekaterina Komendantskaya Vehicle: Bridging the Embedding Gap in the Verification of Neuro-Symbolic Programs. CoRR abs/2401.06379 , 2024. https://lnkd.in/ex5miB2X [2] R. Affeldt, A. Bruni, E. Komendantskaya, N. Slusarz, and K. Stark. Taming Differentiable Logics with Coq Formalisation. In Interactive Theorem Proving (ITP) 2024, 2024. https://lnkd.in/e6eJ54JK
I'm happy to host this cool night of talks at OWASP Copenhagen Chapter hosted by SimCorp, by Willard Rafnsson on information flow control, and Shreyas Srinivasa, Ph.D. on deception and honeypots. Thanks Ender Yüksel, PhD for the support and the lovely venue, and Trifork Security for sponsoring with 🍕!
