Category Archives: News

Inside the historic Stieff Silver Building, Johns Hopkins has built the world’s top facility for studying the atomic structures of materials. Researchers across the Whiting School are using it to reshape fields from energy to oncology.

The alligator gar is not an attractive fish. It boasts a long, toothy snout that looks like a cross between a duck’s bill and an alligator’s grin, by which it earned its name. It can grow to well over six feet and weigh upward of 300 pounds. The alligator gar is a formidable predator, too, but being an apex predator does not mean it lacks natural enemies. And that notion raises the question of why such an ungainly species has survived, virtually unchanged, for nearly 200 million years.

‘Tis the season when ski enthusiasts look to the skies and pray for snow. But if you only hit the slopes a few times a year, is it more economical to buy or simply rent skis, boots, and poles?

That’s a question not only for powder hounds but also for computer scientists, who have been grappling for years with this “rent or buy” dilemma. In their case, it has nothing to do with winter sports and everything to do with decision-making in computer systems. For example, in “snoopy caching,” an operating system needs to decide whether to continually store a requested page in its cache (“renting”) or to invalidate the page to save the update cost, paying a larger price on its next request (“buying”).

A new test of popular AI image generators shows that while they’re supposed to make only G-rated pictures, they can be hacked to create content that’s not suitable for work.

Most online art generators are purported to block violent, pornographic, and other types of questionable content. But Johns Hopkins University researchers manipulated two of the better-known systems to create exactly the kind of images the products’ safeguards are supposed to exclude.

Anton (Tony) Dahbura is co-director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Assured Autonomy, the executive director of the Johns Hopkins University Information Security Institute, and an associate research scientist in computer science at the university’s Whiting School of Engineering. His research focuses on AI assurance, security, fault-tolerant computing, distributed systems, and testing.