Events

Agentic Risk Standard

12:00 PM to 1:00 PM

CSB 453

Wenyue Hua

Prior work on trustworthy AI emphasizes model-internal properties such as bias mitigation, adversarial robustness, and interpretability. As AI systems evolve into autonomous agents deployed in open environments and increasingly connected to payments or assets, the operational meaning of trust shifts to end-to-end outcomes: whether an agent completes tasks, follows user intent, and avoids failures that cause material or psychological harm. These risks are fundamentally product-level and cannot be eliminated by technical safeguards alone because agent behavior is inherently stochastic. To address this gap between model-level reliability and user-facing guarantees, we propose a complementary paradigm grounded in risk management. Inspired by financial underwriting, we introduce a mechanism for AI-mediated transactions that quantify and price task risk and protect user interests through contractual guarantees. Under this mechanism, users receive contractual and deterministic compensation for execution failure, misalignment, or unintended outcomes, shifting trust from an implicit technical property to a measurable and enforceable product guarantee. Towards this goal, we present an end-to-end standard, Agentic Risk Standard, integrating risk assessment, underwriting, and compensation, along with a simulation for evaluation. This standard links technical reliability with economic accountability to enable operational trust in AI agents. ARS’s implementation can be found at t54-labs/AgenticRiskStandard.

Wenyue Hua is currently a senior researcher at Microsoft Research, AI Frontiers. She was a CS postdoctoral researcher at UCSB working with Prof. William Yang Wang. She received her Ph.D. from Rutgers University-New Brunswick, under the supervision of Professor Yongfeng Zhang. Her research focuses on the safety and efficiency of LLM agents, multi-agent reinforcement learning, and LLM reasoning. She was selected as KAUST AI Rising Star in 2025, published over 60 papers at top natural language processing and machine learning conferences such as ACL, EMNLP, ICLR, NeurIPS, TACL.

30+ Years of Malicious Cryptography

4:00 PM to 5:00 PM

CSB 451 CS Auditorium

Moti Yung, Google

Abstract:
Cryptography has historically and currently been used as a tool to protect and authenticate information: encryption of messages and storage, and protecting information in usage as well.
For the last 30+ years, the notion of Malicious Cryptography has developed and evolved. The idea behind this notion is that when a cryptographic system is implemented in a larger system, it can be repurposed to perform tasks beyond its specified goals. Repurposing means that the system's specified goal and the algorithms designed to adhere to that specification covertly change to achieve extended goals, originally involving the service of malicious activity.

Before Malicious Cryptography, some preliminary systems existed that dealt with ``information hiding'' and with ``expanding'' or ``modifying'' the goals of cryptosytems:
(1) The original covert use of systems involved subliminal channels that hide information by employing steganographic channels in the randomness of cryptosystems.
(2) The US government first suggested systems with an expanded purpose: "escrow encryption systems," which included a second receiver; the clipper chip was the first implementation of this concept.
(3) Then, repurposing the goal of cryptography by embedding it in a new setting (like a new software element) without changing it was first suggested by the area of Cryptovirology, where cryptographic ransomware adds public-key encryption to malware (while keeping the decryption key off the malware).

Following the initial ideas described above (which can be called preliminary malicious cryptography), the following took place since the mid 1990s:
(1) The area of Kleptography (also called subverted cryptography, employing what is called an ``algorithm substitution attack'') was developed. Unlike regular backdoors of cryptosystems, these attacks give the attacker exclusive access to the information revealed publicly by the attack.
(2) After it was found that such attacks, most likely, have been used in practice (owing to the Snowden revelations), the area of Cliptography (i.e., anti-subversion cryptography) was suggested, where architectural changes and additional components were added to cryptosystems to mitigate potential subversion.
(3) In recent years the area of Anamorphic Cryptography was developed. In anamorphic schemes, the malicious entity is the authority who may ask to get the receiver's key and/ or may dictate messages to be sent. This area, in turn, examines existing cryptosystems and proposes covert modifications which repurpose the ciphertext to carry an additional cleartext message that is hidden from and deniable to the authorities in spite of their power to possess private decryption keys and determine messages. This shows directly and technically that trying to control the use and keys of strong cryptographic systems may look like it works, but it may turn out to be just a futile exercise.

The notion and various subareas of Malicious Cryptography perhaps call for a revision of the relationships of model and specifications of cryptographic systems, on the one hand, and their implementations and proof of correctness and security, on the other.

Bridging the Gap between Software and Hardware

11:00 AM to 12:00 PM

CSB 453

Lana Josipović

Abstract:
Custom hardware accelerators, such as FPGAs and ASICs, are a promising solution to deal with our increasing computational demands, as they offer high parallelism and energy efficiency. However, a major barrier to their success and adoption is the difficulty of hardware design--a task available exclusively to a limited number of hardware experts. In this talk, I will discuss the challenges and limitations of current hardware design approaches. I will outline hardware compilation techniques that overcome these limitations and make hardware design broadly accessible, fast, and reliable. Finally, I will share my vision for future advancements in hardware design and its accessibility to users from various application domains.

Bio:
Lana Josipović is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering at ETH Zurich. Prior to joining ETH Zurich in 2022, she received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from EPFL. Her research interests include reconfigurable computing and electronic design automation. She is a recipient of various research awards, including the EDAA Outstanding Dissertation Award, EPFL Doctorate Award, Google Ph.D. Fellowship in Systems and Networking, and Best Paper Awards at ISFPGA'20 and FPL'24. She is an Area Editor for IEEE TCAD, Associate Editor for ACM TRETS and TODAES, and served as general, program, and topic chair of several international conferences and workshops, including IWLS, FCCM, FPL, DAC, and DATE.

Undergraduate Class Day

1:00 PM to 2:45 PM

South Lawn, Morningside Campus

Angeliki Frangou, Navios Maritime Holdings Inc.

Undergraduate Ceremony Details:
Date: Monday, May 18, 2026
Time: 1:00 - 2:45 p.m.
Location: South Lawn | Morningside Campus

Speaker: Angeliki Frangou, Chairwoman and Chief Executive Officer of Navios Maritime Holdings Inc.

Diploma: All graduating students must apply for their degree with the University Registrar’s Office. Diplomas are mailed to the “Diploma Address” listed in Student Services Online (SSOL). Please verify/update your address and ensure it will remain valid for at least 8 weeks after graduation, as diplomas are not distributed during commencement activities. For questions or additional information, please contact the University Registrar or visit the Registrar’s Graduation and Diplomas webpage.

School Graduation Website: https://www.cc-seas.columbia.edu/class-day

School Contact:
Columbia Engineering Events
classday@columbia.edu

Graduate Class Day

5:15 PM to 8:00 PM

South Lawn, Morningside Campus

Tom Caulfield, GlobalFoundries

Graduate Ceremony Details:
Date: Monday, May 18, 2026
Time: 5:15 - 8:00 p.m. (Gates Open: 4:15 p.m.)
Location: South Lawn | Morningside Campus

Speaker: Tom Caulfield, Executive Chairman of GlobalFoundries

Diploma: All graduating students must apply for their degree with the University Registrar’s Office. Diplomas are mailed to the “Diploma Address” listed in Student Services Online (SSOL). Please verify/update your address and ensure it will remain valid for at least 8 weeks after graduation, as diplomas are not distributed during commencement activities. For questions or additional information, please contact the University Registrar or visit the Registrar’s Graduation and Diplomas webpage.

School Graduation Website: https://www.engineering.columbia.edu/countdown-engineering-class-day-and-university-commencement

School Contact:
Columbia Engineering Events
seas-grad@columbia.edu

Columbia Engineering Doctoral Hooding Ceremony

2:15 PM to 4:30 PM

Miller Theater

Columbia Engineering Doctoral Hooding Ceremony
Date: Tuesday, May 19
Time: 2:15 - 4:30 p.m.
Location: Miller Theater

Diploma: All graduating students must apply for their degree with the University Registrar’s Office. Diplomas are mailed to the “Diploma Address” listed in Student Services Online (SSOL). Please verify/update your address and ensure it will remain valid for at least 8 weeks after graduation, as diplomas are not distributed during commencement activities. For questions or additional information, please contact the University Registrar or visit the Registrar’s Graduation and Diplomas webpage.

School Graduation Website: https://www.engineering.columbia.edu/countdown-engineering-class-day-and-university-commencement

School Contact:
Engineering Student Affairs
seas-grad@columbia.edu

University Commencement

10:30 AM to 6:30 PM

Morningside Campus

Columbia University’s Commencement ceremony of the 272nd academic year will take place on Wednesday, May 20, 2026, with two celebrations held on the Morningside Campus: one for graduate degree candidates and one for undergraduate degree candidates.

Graduate Ceremony 10:30 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
Undergraduate Ceremony 5:00 - 6:30 p.m.