Thomas Dean

Thomas Dean, Maurice Chiang, Marcus Gomez et al.

This document provides an overview of the material covered in a course taught at Stanford in the spring quarter of 2018. The course draws upon insight from cognitive and systems neuroscience to implement hybrid connectionist and symbolic reasoning systems that leverage and extend the state of the art in machine learning by integrating human and machine intelligence. As a concrete example we focus on digital assistants that learn from continuous dialog with an expert software engineer while providing initial value as powerful analytical, computational and mathematical savants. Over time these savants learn cognitive strategies (domain-relevant problem solving skills) and develop intuitions (heuristics and the experience necessary for applying them) by learning from their expert associates. By doing so these savants elevate their innate analytical skills allowing them to partner on an equal footing as versatile collaborators - effectively serving as cognitive extensions and digital prostheses, thereby amplifying and emulating their human partner's conceptually-flexible thinking patterns and enabling improved access to and control over powerful computing resources.

Thomas Dean, Andrea Goldsmith

We propose the new technique of physical-layer cryptography based on using a massive MIMO channel as a key between the sender and desired receiver, which need not be secret. The goal is for low-complexity encoding and decoding by the desired transmitter-receiver pair, whereas decoding by an eavesdropper is hard in terms of prohibitive complexity. The decoding complexity is analyzed by mapping the massive MIMO system to a lattice. We show that the eavesdropper's decoder for the MIMO system with M-PAM modulation is equivalent to solving standard lattice problems that are conjectured to be of exponential complexity for both classical and quantum computers. Hence, under the widely-held conjecture that standard lattice problems are hard to solve in the worst-case, the proposed encryption scheme has a more robust notion of security than that of the most common encryption methods used today such as RSA and Diffie-Hellman. Additionally, we show that this scheme could be used to securely communicate without a pre-shared secret and little computational overhead. Thus, by exploiting the physical layer properties of the radio channel, the massive MIMO system provides for low-complexity encryption commensurate with the most sophisticated forms of application-layer encryption that are currently known.