Modern high-performance GPU kernels increasingly rely on subgroup-level execution, including subgroup-level communication, subgroup operations, and matrix operations. These features are essential for workloads such as matrix multiplication and FlashAttention, but […]
Modern software increasingly relies on distributed systems to provide accessible, scalable, and reliable services. Choreographic programming brings a global perspective to distributed system development: programmers write a single program that […]
Edge computing and distributed AI systems increasingly operate under heterogeneous resources, dynamic workloads, and frequent failures, requiring both adaptivity and fault tolerance for efficient execution. In heterogeneous edge clusters, nodes […]
Real-time monitoring of infectious disease outbreaks calls for statistical models that recover interpretable quantities such as the time-varying reproduction number from noisy count data, track posterior uncertainty, and run on […]
AI-assisted clinical decisions in medicine, and particularly in dermatology, demand fine-grained understanding across diverse skin tones, body sites, and disease types, yet expert-annotated datasets are scarce, demographically imbalanced, and almost […]
Modern AI systems are rapidly moving beyond static text generation toward capable models and agents that reason, use tools, store memories, and update persistent state, yet safety methods still often […]
Due to their increasing complexity, autonomous decision-making agents rely on increasingly advanced algorithms, from classical control theory to reinforcement learning (RL) and, more recently, large vision-language models. While these algorithms help automate the decision-making in complex systems, they bring newer attack vulnerabilities that an adversary can exploit. In this dissertation, we study the security of […]
AI-assisted clinical decisions in medicine, and particularly in dermatology, demand fine-grained understanding across diverse skin tones, body sites, and disease types, yet expert-annotated datasets are scarce, demographically imbalanced, and almost devoid of rare presentations. This dissertation develops four deep learning systems for this low-label, low-coverage regime. We introduce HealNet, which learns wound healing stages from […]
Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) have become essential platforms for parallel computing, supporting applications far beyond graphics. Central to GPU programming models is its memory consistency specification (MCS), which defines the semantics of concurrent shared-memory operations and interacts with other language features to determine security guarantees such as memory safety. Understanding whether implementations conform to an […]
Dual Attention Transformers (DATs) extend decoder-only Transformers with a dedicated relational-attention stream, making them a natural architecture for abstract identity rules such asABA and ABB. Surprisingly, we find that comparably sized GPT-2 models outperform DATs on these tasks. We investigate this gap with two complementary mechanistic analyses. First, causal mediation analysis shows that DATs exhibit […]
While the human brain learns continually, mastering new tasks without forgetting the old and adapting to unfamiliar ones from context alone, modern neural networks still lack both. To bridge the gap between biological adaptivity and modern AI, we have established foundational work on sparsity as a computational principle at three levels of neural computation, through […]
Games user researchers (GURs) use various methods to understand when a game is overloading its players. In games research where data-driven multimodal approaches are necessary to drive insights, the currently available tools to measure user load are coarse, one-dimensional, and often aggregated. The more dominant instruments, such as the Cognitive Load Scale (CLS) and the […]
Three learners who fail the same level of an educational game the same number of times can be failing in three different ways, and the difference determines what each should do next. Yet the measures a game’s logs are usually reduced to (completion time, error counts, mastery estimates) render the three identical. This proposal takes […]