work

I'm back at Stevens! Leaving my projects on hold for a week put my behind, so most of this week I was playing catchup. I also didn't work on my S&P reviews on vacation, but I managed to push through and get them all in before the deadline on Friday. Fortunately, it was just a few and these second cycle reviews are always better quality. With that in, and the DSO report under review right now, I'm hopeful that next week will be more research focused. Although, I still have some class prep and presentation preparation for DSO that I need to do.

I started setting up group meetings this week, which are fun! It's good to see my "lab" start to form up, even though I don't have any traditional PhD students. Research otherwise has been a little stressful. I have two papers that I want to submit to Eurocrypt in a month, but I'm afraid my time will be stretched a little thin. On top of this, some colleagues pointed out a bug in our recent paper while I was on vacation. We didn't find a fix, but fortunately, the updated result is still interesting (even if it's weaker than what we claimed). So, I need to revise that paper and re-upload ASAP. Thanks to Mingxun, Wei-Kai, and Shinyu for pointing out the error!

On top of this, the department is shuffling the offices around. So, I'm going to have to move to the Gateway South building next Wednesday. Despite all this going on though, I'm very glad to be back and working on such interesting stuff. :-)

non-work

My work this week cut a bit into my out of work life, so I haven't really gone out and about. Though, I still managed to play some games and read a bit. I've mostly been playing Slay the Spire 2 and just beat A7 with all the characters! I still don't think I've very good compared to many of my friends, but I enjoy most my my runs. My friends and I have also been playing a decent bit of "friend slop." We started Big Walk and just yesterday played the new update of Peak. Both are very fun, and I think the current glut of these friend slop games is really nice. It'll be fun to watch how long the era lasts.

I just started Bullshit Jobs this week. I don't know if I've ever read a book by an Anthropology professor. I don't want to over generalize, but the writing is different than a lot of the other books I've ready --- even those by other academics. It's definitely interesting to read how much this characterization resonates with many people, and it makes me reflect on parts of my own job which are "bullshit." Mostly though, I feel very grateful that I'm able to do what I do and feel that there's some sense of impact in most of my job. (Even though the theoretical work which may not get deployed :-)).

This week I also found out that Ted Lasso is airing again! So I've been watching that. And I'm very glad I can watch Silo with my partner for our afternoon virtual date.

questions

• How many companies use the C2PA standard?
  • I have a current project which is related and tries to introduce a solution in a relaxed threat model.
  • There doesn't seem to be a perfect solution for provenance detection, but hopefully we can build better tools that companies actually want to deploy.
  • When editing images, is it more reasonable to allow local signature modification with NIZK type techniques or just to resign the image+diff in a THM?
• Are the recent requirements for GenAI detection of the EU AI Act reasonable?
  • I haven't looked into it too much, but I think they require detection for 200-token outputs. But this is just impossible for low-entropy outputs...
  • I don't know if there are any technical specifications, but I feel like getting the infrastructure right is still an open practical/research problem.
  • It'll be interesting to see if this is actually enforced internationally too

Thanks for reading to the end! Here's a picture of Timmy hiding in his sleeping corner on top of my dresser.