CISPA-Ellis-Summer School 2025

This year's Summer School at CISPA- Helmholtz Center for Information Security will be supported by ELLIS and ELSA.

When: August 4-8, 2025

Where: CISPA - Helmholtz Center for Information Security, Saarbruecken, Germany.

We are inviting applications from graduate students and researchers in the areas of Computer Science and Cybersecurity with a focus on AI. During our annual scientific event, students will have the opportunity to follow one week of scientific talks and workshops, present their own work during poster sessions and discuss relevant topics with fellow researchers and expert speakers. The program will be complemented by social activities.

Application Process: Please fill in the application form and upload your CV, a Motivation Letter, University Certificate of Transcript of Records.

Notification of Acceptance: Several rounds of acceptance, roughly 3 weeks after application at the latest.

Fee: 200,-€ (includes full program, food and beverages during the week, weekly local bus ticket, and social activities)

Deadline for Regular Application: June 30, 2025.

Deadline for Late Application (wait list) to be announced

Travel Grant: We are offering travel grants for students who participate actively in the whole event and present their work during a poster session. With your application, you can apply for a grant for accommodation, train/plane tickets and locl transport (actual travel cost spent, economy flight, train ticket 2nd class). Please do not book any travel arrangements before you have been selected by our jury and accepted to our Summer School. After acceptance, please send your travel arrangements to cysec-lab@cispa.de for approval prior to booking anything. We will confirm if/that your expenses will be covered and you will be reimbursed after completing the Summer School successfully.

Presentations: There will be several sessions, during which participants can present their own work / a scientific poster. The presentation is not mandatory to receive a certificate of attendance, but we are highly encouraging you to contribute your work to this session and as it will provide you with valuable feedback from an expert audience and might kindle interesting discussions.

Summer School Program

The Summer School will kick off Monday morning around 11am with a Welcome Session and the first talks. Tuesday - Thursday will be full-day programs from 9 am to the evening (ending with socializing at dinner). There will be 2 coffee breaks and a lunch and dinner break daily. There will be roughly 4 content sessions + poster sessions during dinner per day. Wednesday afternoon, we will have a bus excursion involving some local sightseeing, a walk and a joint dinner. The school will end Friday early afternoon, so you can start your trip back home.

Invited Speakers

Andrew Paverd (Microsoft)

Title: Lessons leaned from two years of generative AI vulnerability response

Antti Honkela (University of Helsinki)

Title 1: Introduction to differential privacy
Title 2: Differentially private deep learning

Battista Biggio (University of Cagliari/Pluribus One)

Borja Balle (DeepMind)

Title: Towards Privacy-Aware AI agents

Jamie Hayes (Google Deepmind)

Title: Improving Gemini's Robustness to Indirect Prompt Injections

Jenia Jitsev (LAION)

Title: Open Foundation Models - Scaling Laws and Generalization
Abstract: Obtaining models that generalize well and show transfer across various tasks and conditions following generalist pre-training is one of the most important recent breakthroughs in machine learning. Such foundation models exhibit scaling laws, showing generalization improvement with increasing pre-training model, data and compute scales. Derivation of scaling laws emerged as important approach to predict various model properties and functions, including generalization and transfer, at larger scales from experiments executed on small scales. Scalins laws can also be used to perform systematic comparison of resulting models and learning procedures. We show how such derivation can be conducted to provide accurate prediction and comparison of capabilities across scales on example of open language-vision foundation models and datasets. We discuss the importance of open foundation models that ensure full reproducibility of their whole research pipeline - data, training, evaluation - for scaling law studies. Further, measuring generalization is crucial part of establishing scaling laws, and we show that this task is far from being solved. We highlight failures of standardized benchmarks to detect severe deficits in generalization existing in current frontier models and propose new measurement tools based on simple problems and their controlled variations, aiming for creation of corresponding benchmarks that can provide proper assessment of model generalization, able to detect its breakdown.

Joacquin Vanschoren (TU Eindhoven)

Title: Safety Benchmarks for General-Purpose AI Models

Mathias Lecuyer (University of British Columbia)

Title: Adversarial Robustness and Privacy-Measurements Using Hypothesis-Tests
Abstract: ML theory usually considers model behaviour in expectation. In practical AI deployments however, we often expect models to be robust to adversarial perturbations, in which a user applies deliberate changes to on input to influence the prediction a target model. For instance, such attacks have been used to jailbreak aligned foundation models out of their normal behaviour. Given the complex models that we now deploy, how can we enforce such robustness properties while keeping model flexibility and utility?I will present recent work on Adaptive Randomized Smoothing (ARS), an approach we developed to certify the predictions of test-time adaptive models against adversarial examples. ARS extends the analysis of randomized smoothing using f-Differential Privacy, to certify the adaptive composition of multiple steps during model prediction. We show how to instantiate ARS on deep image classification to certify predictions against adversarial examples of bounded L∞ norm. If time permits, I will also connect f-Differential Privacy's hypothesis testing view of privacy to the audit of data leakage in large AI models. Specifically, I will discuss a new data leakage measurement technique we developed, that does not require access to in-distribution non-member data. This is particularly important in the age of foundation models, often trained on all available data at a given time. It is also related to recent efforts in detecting data use in large AI models, a timely question at the intersection of AI and intellectual property.

Matthew Jagielski (Google Deepmind)

Title: Data Poisening

Om Thakkar (OpenAI)

Title: Privacy-Leakage in Speech Models: Attacks and Mitigations
Abstract: Recent research has highlighted the vulnerability of neural networks to unintended memorization of training examples, raising significant privacy concerns. In this talk, we first explore two primary types of privacy leakage: extraction attacks and memorization audits. Specifically, we examine novel extraction attacks targeting speech models and discuss efficient methodologies for auditing memorization. In the second half of the talk, we will present empirical privacy approaches that enable training state-of-the-art speech models while effectively reducing memorization risks.

CISPA Speakers

Mario Fritz

Welcome Talk

Franziska Boenisch

Title: Memorization in Foundation Models: Insights and Mitigation

More details will follow soon. We are publishing the program schedule during the month of April.

Please have a look at last year's Summer School on Usable Security , last year's Summer School on Privacy-Preserving Cryptography Summer School 2023, Summer School 2022, or our Digital Summer School 2021 to get a general idea of the event.

If you have any questions or queries for any of our summer schools, our Summer-School team will be glad to help via summer-school@cispa.de.

Please note that we are always publishing speakers and topics/titles on our website, as soon as they are confirmed. Please refrain from requesting titles and detailed topics etc. via e-mail. If you want to wait with your application until the detailed program is finished, that is perfectly fine. We just want to give interested students this opportunity to register early and secure their spot ahead of time.

Frequently Asked Questions (Summer School FAQ)

1. Can I attend several Summer Schools?

Yes, if you attended one of our Summer Schools, of course you are welcome to apply for any of the following years. If there are two Summer Schools in one year, you can apply for both Summer Schools. It is advisable to mention a specific research focus in your application that aligns with your interests and your prior education.

2. What criteria are considered in the selection process of participants?

Our jury selects the participants of the Summer Schools. We have strict criteria for selecting participants for our Summer School due to the high number of applications compared to the limited available spots. We give priority to those currently studying or with a background in the Summer School's topic. A foundational knowledge in the field is required, and participants should have reached a certain academic level. For instance, individuals in the early stages of a Bachelor's degree may not qualify. This is important because the Summer School is interactive, and having prior knowledge is crucial for active participation.

3. How does the travel grant work?

You can apply for a travel grant during your application if your travel costs are not reimbursed by your employer. Our jury will select participants and approve the travel grant within availability. You will only receive reimbursement after successful completion of the Summer School which means actively attending every day of the event. Another requirement for reimbursement is that you actively participate in the Summer School by presenting a poster during the poster session. There might be additional requirements for a specific Summer School which will be mentioned on the event’s website. If your travel grant was approved you need to hand in receipts after completion of the Summer School for all expenses in connection with your travels. The participation fee secures your spot for the event and covers catering, drinks, course materials and the full program. Thus it cannot be refunded via the travel grant. Only receipts dated within one day before the start of the event until the last day are eligible for reimbursement. Exceptions require prior approval via email. Please book accommodations from our recommendation list when possible or contact us for approval prior your booking.

4. What do I have to consider for the format of my poster presentation?

Your poster should be in portrait format, A0 size, please bring your printed poster with you. If you don’t have the possibility to print it yourself, send it as a PDFX file via email to us within the deadline mentioned being accepted to our event. Each presentation will be limited to 5 minutes, followed by a short discussion.

5. What if I have certain dietary requirements?

If you have specific dietary restrictions, please include that information in your application. We strive to accommodate all dietary needs to the best of our ability. Additionally, rest assured that there is always a vegetarian option available for individuals with restrictions concerning meat.

6. What do I have to bring?

Bring your own laptop. Course materials and catering during the event will be provided and is included in the fee. You will receive handouts and presentations after the event of every speaker who agreed to distribute them.

7. Do I get a certificate of participation?

Yes, a certificate will be provided if you successfully attend all days of the Summer School.

8. What if I bring a person who does not participate and we share a room?

We can only reimburse costs for participants. If you bring your partner or a friend to share your hotel room, please provide receipts and comparison prices for the expenses that would have occurred if you traveled alone, and we will reimburse accordingly.

9. What if I want to share a room with another Summer School participant?

Both individuals should ensure the hotel receipt includes both names. Submit this receipt, and each of you will receive half the reimbursement for the hotel room cost.

10. What if I have to cancel my participation?

If you cancel at short notice after confirming and paying the participation fee, refunds cannot be issued. You can, however, name a substitute participant with similar qualifications. Refunds are contingent on having enough time to rearrange event planning (e.g. transport and catering).

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