Prof. Ravi Iyer is teaching a graduate course on Dependable AI Systems (ECE 598). The course will feature guest lectures from leading researchers from universities and industry.
For more details, please visit https://courses.grainger.illinois.edu/ece598rki/fa2021/
Guest Lecture – Open to all Students
Speaker: Professor Karthik Pattabiraman, University of British Columbia (UBC)
Title: Detection is not Enough: Low-Cost Error and Attack Recovery in Autonomous Systems
Date/Time: 10/11/2021, 11:00 AM – 12:20 PM – (ZOOM information listed below)
Abstract
With the rise of autonomous systems such as self-driving cars and robotic vehicles, it is becoming increasingly important to ensure that they are resilient to both accidental and malicious faults (i.e., attacks). Unlike traditional systems, autonomous systems need to be capable of automatically recovering from errors and attacks without human intervention, while keeping the overall costs low due to resource constraints. This poses significant challenges.
In this talk, I will describe two systems that we have built in my group to provide dependability and security in autonomous systems. The first system, Ranger, performs error correction in Deep Neural Network (DNN) based systems for hardware transient faults (i.e., soft errors). The main idea is to automatically transform critical faults to benign faults that can be tolerated by the inherent resilience of the DNN. The second system, PID-Piper, allows robotic vehicles such as drones and rovers to automatically recover from physical attacks that target their on-board sensors, and complete their missions successfully. The main idea is to build an attack resilient controller that can take over from the classic PID controller in the event of an attack. Finally, I’ll present some of our ongoing work, and discuss the future challenges in this space.
Biography
Karthik Pattabiraman is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Canada. He received his PhD in 2009 in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), an MS in Computer Science also from UIUC in 2004, and B. Tech. from the University of Madras, India, in 2001. Before joining UBC in 2010, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research (MSR). Karthik’s research interests are in dependable systems, cyber-physical systems, and software security. Karthik has won awards such as the Inaugural Rising Star in Dependability Award, UIUC CS department’s early career alumni achievement award, UBC-wide Killam awards for Mentoring and Research excellence, NSERC Discovery Accelerator Supplement (DAS) in Canada, and the William Carter PhD Dissertation Award. He has published over 100 papers and has won a total of 10 best paper (or runner up) awards along with his students. Karthik is a member of the IFIP Working Group (WG) 10.4 on Dependable Computing and Fault-tolerance (vice-chair from 2019-2021), and a member of the steering committee of the IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN). He is a senior member of both the IEEE and the ACM. Find out more about him at: http://blogs.ubc.ca/karthik/
