Ep 3: Applying ML to Cybersecurity, with Yihua Liao Building Things with Machine Learning

Yihua Liao is Head of Data Science at Netskope, a next-generation cybersecurity firm. Yihua talks about using both CV and NLP to create novel cybersecurity features. Yihua Liao’s PhD research was on security and machine learning, and he previously worked at Microsoft, Facebook, Uber, and his own startup.
For more information about this podcast, visit https://yaoshiang.com/podcast.html.
 
Show Notes: 
00:24 - How Netskope addresses cybersecurity.
00:57 - Netskope’s unique approach to cybersecurity through network traffic routing.
02:51 - The prior approach to cybersecurity: a focus on the physical perimeter and firewalls.
03:44 - A unique application of Image Classification in cybersecurity: identifying sensitive documents like driver’s licenses so CISOs (chief information security officer) can set security rules for them.
07:45 - Challenges of building Image Classifiers #1: High quality data.
08:45 - Challenges of building Image Classifiers #2: Managing false positive and false negatives (recall and precision).
09:15 - Challenges of building Image Classifiers #3: Managing latency (15 ms) for a real-time use case.
10:38 - An application of NLP (natural language processing) in cybersecurity: classifying phishing websites.
13:46 - Optimizing LLMs (Large Language Models) through quantization and distillation.
14:45 - How Yihua got into ML. 16:10 - How ML has evolved over the past 15 years.
Notes: https://www.netskope.com/ https://www.netskope.com/blog/enhancing-security-with-ai-ml
A video version of this episode is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3e0UPqenwo.