Scott Alfeld
Associate Professor
Computer Science Department
Amherst College
salfeld at amherst.edu
www.scottalfeld.net
CV
Research
My primary research focused is adversarial methods. I investigate the security ramifications of using AI and data analysis methods in domains consisting of a diverse set of (potentially adversarial) agents and work to harden systems against manipulation attacks.
Publications
Conference Papers:
- A. Sakar, M. Lanier, S. Alfeld, R. Garnett, N. Jacobs, Y. Vorobeychik
"A Visual Active Search Fromwork for Geospatial Exploration"
in Proceedings of the Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision, 2024
- Z. Kong, S. Alfeld
"A Visual Active Search Fromwork for Geospatial Exploration"
in Proceedings of European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI '23)
- A. Vartanian, W. Rosenbaum, S.Alfeld
"Training-Time Attacks Against k-Nearest Neighbors."
in Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI ’23)
- N. G. Marchant, B. I. P. Rubinstein, S. Alfeld
"Hard to Forget: Poisoning Attacks on Certified Machine Unlearning"
in Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI ’22)
- B. A. Miller, Z. Shafi, W. Ruml, Y. Vorobeychik, T. Eliassi-Rad, S. Alfeld
“PATHATTACK: Attacking Shortest Paths in
Complex Networks"
in Proceedings of the European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML PKDD '21)
- D. Liu, Z. Shafi, W. Fleisher, T. Eliassi-Rad, S. Alfeld.
“RAWLSNET: Altering Bayesian Networks to Encode Rawlsian Fair Equality of Opportunity."
in Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics and Society (AIES '21)
- S. Yu, L. Torres, S. Alfeld, T. Eliassi-Rad, Y. Vorobeychik
“POTION: Optimizing Graph Structure for Targeted Diffusion"
in Proceedings of Siam International Conference on Data Mining (SDM '21)
- S. Alfeld, A. Vartanian, L. Newman-Johnson, B. I. P. Rubinstein
“Attacking Data Transforming Learners at Training Time"
in Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI ’19)
- A. Sen, S. Alfeld, X. Zhang, A. Vartanian, Y. Ma, X. Zhu
"Training Set Camouflage"
in Proceedings of the Conference on Decision and Game Theory for Security (GameSec '18)
- L. Tong, S. Yu, S. Alfeld, Y. Vorobeychik
“Adversarial Regression with Multiple Learners"
in Proceedings of the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML '18)
- S. Yu, Y. Vorobeychik, S. Alfeld
“Adversarial Classification on Social Networks"
in Proceedings of the International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS '18)
- S. Alfeld, X. Zhu, P. Barford
“Explicit Defense Actions Against Test-Set Attacks"
in Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI ’17)
- A. Cahn, S. Alfeld, P. Barford, S. Muthukrishnan
“What’s in the Community Cookie Jar?”
in Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM Conference on Advances in Social Network Analysis and Mining (ASONAM ’16)
- S. Alfeld, X. Zhu, P. Barford
“Machine Teaching as Search”
in Proceedings of the Symposium on Combinatorial Search (SoCS '16)
- S. Alfeld, X. Zhu, P. Barford
“Data Poisoning Attacks Against Autoregressive Models”
in Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI ’16)
- A. Cahn, S. Alfeld, P. Barford, S. Muthukrishnan
“An Empirical Study of Web Cookies”
in Proceedings of the World Wide Web Conference (WWW ’16)
- M. Malloy, S. Alfeld, P. Barford
“Contamination Estimation via Convex Relaxations”
in Proceedings of IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT ’15)
- S. Alfeld, P. Barford
“Targeted Residual Analysis for Improving Electric Load Forecasting”
in Proceedings of IEEE Energy Conference (Energycon ’14)
- S. Alfeld, C. Barford, P. Barford
“Toward an Analytic Framework for the Electrical Power Grid”
in Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Future Energy Systems (e-Energy ’12)
Journal Articles:
Workshop Papers:
- M. Stein, S. Alfeld
"GARFD: Gradient-based Autoregressive Forecaster Defense"
NeurIPS Workshop on Dataset Curation and Security, 2020
- X. Zhang, H. Ohannessian, A. Sen, S. Alfeld, X. Zhu
"Optimal Teaching for Online Perceptrons"
NIPS Constructive Machine Learning Workshop, 2016
- S. Alfeld, P. Barford, X. Zhu
“Optimal Defense Actions Against Test Set Attacks”
ICML Workshop on Reliable Machine Learning in the Wild, 2016.
- S. Alfeld, K. Berkele, S. DeSalvo, T. Pham, D. Russo, L.J. Yan, M.E. Taylor
“Reducing the Team Uncertainty Penalty: Empirical and Theoretical Approaches”
in Proceedings of the workshop on multiagent sequential decision making in uncertain domains, 2011.
- S. Alfeld, M.E. Taylor, P. Tandon, M. Tambe
“Towards a Theoretic Understanding of DCEE”
in Proceedings of the Distributed Constraint Reasoning workshop, May 2010.
Education
- PhD, May 2017
Department of Computer Sciences
University of Wisconsin--Madison
Advisers: Paul Barford and Xiaojin (Jerry) Zhu
Thesis Title: Learning in the Presence of Adversaries
- Masters, June 2015
Department of Computer Sciences
University of Wisconsin--Madison
- Bachelors, August 2008
School of Computing
University of Utah