Industry Track - Defense Against the Dark Arts

Panel: Defense against the Dark Arts: Protecting the Consumer Web


Panel Chair:

David Freeman (Research Scientist/Engineer at Facebook)



Abstract:

Today's large consumer-facing web services such as Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn allow people and businesses to be more connected and productive than ever before. However, any platform that grows to massive scale also becomes a prime target for spam, phishing, impersonation, and many other forms of fraud and abuse. Indeed, the same properties that make these services so successful also allow bad guys to scale their attacks to reach a broad audience. 
 
In this panel we will discuss the threats that face large-scale web services and core principles that have been used to successfully protect their users. We will also discuss emerging threats and the panelists' visions for the next generation of abuse-fighting technology.
 

Panelists:

Jenelle Bray leads the Anti-Abuse Relevance Team at LinkedIn. Her team is charged with preventing fraud and abuse across the LinkedIn site and ecosystem. Their work involves researching, developing, and deploying machine learning systems to detect and stop bad guys at massive scale. The type of abuse they fight includes fake accounts, account take overs, and scraping. Jenelle has a Ph.D. in computational chemistry from Caltech and did postdoctoral research in computational structural biology at Stanford University.
 
Julian Gonzalez has worked in various roles for Microsoft Azure since it was an R&D project.  Previously, he was an Operations Manager for Azure, including the Government Cloud where he owned Azure’s security incident response programs.  Today he owns the Azure fraud detection and forensics programs.  His focus is building automated cloud scale investigation services to address today's security threats in addition to developing and maintaining a ML-based detection service to combat fraud and abuse.
 
Angelina Huang is a software engineer on the Risk team at Airbnb. The Risk team implements features that prevent on-platform fraud, writes tools for Trust and Safety Operations, builds machine learning models to predict and detect suspicious activity, and protects Airbnb’s users off the platform. As a part of Risk's infrastructure team, Angelina worked on rearchitecting the framework for challenging suspicious users and sessions, as well as building the pipeline for collecting and processing user identifications. 
 
Hervé Robert is an Engineering Manager at Facebook supporting a team protecting people from spam, scams, and other profit-oriented abuse. He has worked on abuse-related problems for close to five years on both Instagram and Facebook, focusing on many challenges inherent in measuring, detecting and mitigating abuse at scale. He is currently focused on building large systems and strategies to measure and alleviate the impact of spam on people using Facebook.
 
Vicente Silveira is currently the Head of Fraud Data Science at Uber and an adviser at Juvo. Prior to joining Uber, Vicente was Director of Engineering at LinkedIn, where he focused on building a safe, scalable and engaging professional network site. Previously, he worked for VeriSign for 8 years in product and international teams. He started his career as a founding employee of CertiSign which became one of the first successful internet startups in Brazil. He has a Computer Engineering degree from PUC-Rio and currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his family.
 
Andy Wen is the product lead for Counter Abuse at Google where they use AI and ML to keep spam and abuse out of 100+ Google products like GMail, YouTube, Maps and Google Cloud Platform.   Google fosters a safe Internet for everyone with tools such as the Perspectives API that improves online conversations with toxic speech detection.  Prior to Google, Andy was a product leader at Capital One, E*TRADE and Payoff.  He attended Princeton University for his undergrad and received his MBA from Columbia Business School.  In his spare time, he is playing squash with his boys.