Principal Engineer at Google, AI and Infrastructure
Joined May 2009
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- Following544
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Joan Smith retweeted
Announcing a major milestone achieved by my team @GoogleDeepMind: we have proven key security properties of the machine code underlying the Signal messaging protocol. This is the first time the actual production code of a widely deployed protocol has been formally verified – by any method, with or without AI – and at this depth.
More than a research breakthrough, it’s a prime example of how frontier AI can be a force multiplier to counter the speed and scale of modern cyber threats.
Formal verification offers a higher standard of security; however, it’s extremely complex and time consuming, which is why in many cases it’s considered to be impractical. Similar efforts could take teams decades of combined effort. We did it in a month’s time.
Using AlphaProof Code, Google DeepMind's new agentic framework for formal verification that runs on LLMs including Gemini Carbon, we verified the Signal protocol down to the actual code running on devices. This milestone lays the groundwork for a future in which vital systems, from medical device firmware to power grid software, ship with mathematical proof that their protections work.
Reaching that future will take continued research from our community. In that spirit, we're open-sourcing our formal specifications and verification artifacts so others can build on this work.
On a personal note, this moment is of deep significance to me. I started my own research journey more than two decades ago as an intern working on checking the consistency of complex software systems. Seeing this grand challenge made practical with modern AI is extraordinary.
I'm extremely proud of my team members: Swarat Chaudhuri, Andrew Ferraiuolo, Anton Kovsharov, Tej Chajed, Sam Schlesinger, Karn Seth, Jonathan Katz, and Charles Sutton for taking on this grand challenge and delivering, and grateful to the Signal team for their partnership.
deepmind.google/blog/formal-…
Joan Smith retweeted
Pleased to share my lab’s new manuscript integrating genomics, drug development, cell biology, and mouse modeling to comprehensively evaluate the cyclin-dependent kinase CDK11 as a drug target in cancer.
Joan Smith retweeted
At-home pregnancy tests were invented in 1967, but for years the FDA prevented them from being sold to consumers.
Regulators believed that it was dangerous for people to be able to obtain this information directly - medical information had to come from a doctor, of course.
We’re updating Claude Fable 5’s biology safeguards to reduce false positives. In our testing, this update reduced biology-related fallbacks by about 85% across our product surfaces.
Fable can now assist on a wider range of everyday health and educational questions.
We believe the biggest positive impacts of AI will be in biology and medicine, and we’re committed to putting frontier intelligence safely into the hands of as many researchers as possible. Fable will continue to fallback to Opus 5 for requests we consider dual-use—including virology, toxicology, and molecular design—so it isn't yet usable for professional biology research and drug development.
We're committed to closing that gap through trusted access pathways for frontier biology capabilities.
anthropic.com/news/improving…
Joan Smith retweeted
You can write a self-replicating physical program in just 45 tokens (RNA bases). That's small enough to emerge spontaneously via brute force recombination at scale.
AI is cool and all... but a new paper in @ScienceMagazine kind of figured out the origin of life?
The paper reports the discovery of a simple 45-nucleotide RNA molecule that can perfectly copy itself.
Joan Smith retweeted
I’m excited to share a new postdoctoral opportunity in my lab at Stanford to study the consequences of gene dosage alterations in iPS cells. Check out the posting below and shoot me an email if you’re interested -
Joan Smith retweeted
New from my lab on bioRxiv - we found an existing drug that appears to be safe in humans that selectively kills chemotherapy-resistant cancer cells.
A clinical-stage oncology compound selectively targets drug-resistant cancers biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/… #biorxiv_cancer
Joan Smith retweeted
Thrilled to share our new paper describing the development and characterization of CDK11 inhibitors for cancer therapy. We also establish a new system that I think represents a huge leap forward in our ability to understand drug toxicity in a living organism.
I'm thrilled to share that my family and I are moving to Palo Alto. I'll be continuing my work at Google building out our AI infrastructure for maximal efficiency and speed.
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It's an incredible time for the field and our company, and I am so excited to continue this work in-person with my brilliant colleagues.
And, pulling everything together, my husband Jason will be joining the faculty at Stanford, moving his cancer research lab from Yale.
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Joan Smith retweeted
An interesting trend I found:
Among the top 10 national winners at the Intel/Westinghouse Science Fair from 1990 to 2002, 66% of them are now in academia.
Among the same group from 2003 to 2014, less than a third are academics.
Joan Smith retweeted
Check out our new study in @ScienceMagazine, where we take on a 100-year-old debate: what’s the role of aneuploidy in cancer?
We discovered that genetically removing extra chromosomes blocks cancer growth - a phenomenon we call “aneuploidy addiction”. science.org/doi/10.1126/scie…
Joan Smith retweeted
Proud to announce the launch of Meliora Therapeutics, a mechanism-focused drug development company, co-founded with @davidycli and @joans, with $11M in seed funding from @HOFCapital, @obviousvc, @Zhenfund, @villageglobal, and others.
wsj.com/articles/biotech-mel…
Joan Smith retweeted
Welcome Tavi Glenn Sheltzer-Smith! Born on 4/21/22. 8 pounds 3 ounces, 21 inches long. Mother and baby are doing great!
Joan Smith retweeted
a popular myth is that people who are Very Computer have computers that work. nothing could be further from the truth. the Very Computer are capable of generating much more novel and fascinating ways to make computers not fucking work and exercise this capability wantonly
Joan Smith retweeted
New paper from @joans and me! A pan-cancer, cross-platform analysis identifies >100,000 genomic biomarkers for cancer outcomes. Plus, a website to explore the data (survival.cshl.edu) and a (controversial?) discussion of “cause” vs. “correlation” in cancer genome analysis.
Genome-wide identification and analysis of prognostic features in human cancers biorxiv.org/cgi/content/shor… #bioRxiv
Joan Smith retweeted
I’m excited to share that I’ll be joining the Yale School of Medicine as an assistant professor! My lab will be moving from CSHL to Yale this summer. And we’re hiring! If you’re interested in working on cancer genomics, chromosome engineering, or drug targeting, drop me a line.
This is a great team of smart and kind people that does super cool, meaningful work.
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Joan Smith retweeted
Can’t wait for @wirecutter to tell me which vaccine to take.
Joan Smith retweeted
Pfizer’s Covid-19 Vaccine Proves 90% Effective in Latest Trials
wsj.com/articles/covid-19-va…
SCIENCE WINS!!! This is GREAT news for mRNA technology, AWESOME for the stabilized prefusion spike antigen.
I am in tears.
