Seminar

WinC Seminar

Find out about the exciting research going on in our Women in Cryptography community and get advice from more senior researchers in our Women in Cryptography Seminar!

Are you interested in joining the seminar or do you have any suggestions for exciting speakers for the next edition? Please write us an e-mail.

2nd Edition of WinC Seminar May/June 2024

We will host our second WinC Seminar between May and June 2024.

We will have this amazing set of speakers:

The talks are:

1st of May at 19.00pm CEST: AI4Crypto: Machine Learning attacks on Post-Quantum Cryptography by Kristin Lauter.

Kristin Lauter is Senior Director of FAIR Labs North America (2022—present), based in Seattle. Her current research areas are AI4Crypto and Private AI. She joined FAIR (Facebook AI Research) in 2021, after 22 years at Microsoft Research (MSR). At MSR she was Partner Research Manager on the senior leadership team of MSR Redmond. Before joining Microsoft in 1999, she was Hildebrandt Assistant Professor of Mathematics at the University of Michigan (1996-1999). She is an Affiliate Professor of Mathematics at the University of Washington (2008—present). She received all her advanced degrees from the University of Chicago, BA (1990), MS (1991), PhD (1996) in Mathematics. She is best known for her work on Elliptic Curve Cryptography, Supersingular Isogeny Graphs in Cryptography, Homomorphic Encryption (SEALcrypto.org), Private AI, and AI4Crypto. She served as President of the Association for Women in Mathematics from 2015-2017 and on the Council of the American Mathematical Society from 2014-2017.

Lauter has been recognized for her mathematical research and leadership with numerous awards: the Selfridge Prize in Computational Number Theory (2008), as an elected Fellow of the American Mathematical Society (2015), Fellow of the Association for Women in Mathematics (2017), Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) in 2020, and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2020). In 2021, Lauter was elected as an honorary member of the Royal Spanish Mathematical Society (RSME). She was awarded the Pólya Lectureship for the Mathematical Association of America (2018–2020) and the SIAM Block Community Prize Lecturer in 2022. She gave a TED talk on Private AI at Congreso Futuro in 2020 and on AI4Crypto in 2023.
22nd of May at 10.00am CEST: Homomorphic encryption: from theory to practice by Miran Kim.

Miran Kim is an assistant professor of the Department of Mathematics and affiliated with the Department of Computer Science at Hanyang University. Before joining Hanyang University, she was an assistant professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and Graduate School of Artificial Intelligence at Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST). Miran Kim received her Ph.D. in mathematical sciences at Seoul National University, Korea, in 2017. Her research focuses on the design of novel strategies to enable secure and privacy-preserving data analysis using homomorphic encryption. She has extensive experience in the implementation of efficient protocols for data query processing, genome analysis, and machine learning.

You can re-watch the talk on youtube: WinC Seminar: Homomorphic encryption: from theory to practice - Miran Kim
12th of June at 14.00pm CEST: Learning with Errors: How to find long vectors towards a successful career by Allison Bishop.

Allison Bishop is the President and co-founder of Proof Trading, a startup agency broker-dealer for US equities. She is also a visiting assistant professor of computer science at City College, CUNY, where she teaches graduate courses in adversarial AI and data privacy. She is currently serving as the Vice President of the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR), and is the creator of CFAIL, an annual conference for failed approaches and insightful losses in cryptology. She was formerly a quantitative researcher at IEX (a US stock exchange), an assistant professor of computer science at Columbia University, and an adjunct researcher for the Institute for Defense Analyses. She holds a PhD in computer science from the University of Texas at Austin, a masters in mathematics from the University of Cambridge, and a bachelors in mathematics from Princeton University. Her areas of expertise include applied machine learning, cryptography, trading algorithm design, market microstructure, and distributed systems. She has also won a National Science Foundation Career Award, co-authored a children's book about math, and is a trained standup and sketch comedian whose work was recently honored as a finalist at the New York Short Film Festival.

You can re-watch the talk on youtube: WinC Seminar: Career Advice - Learning with Errors - Allison Bishop
19th of June at 10.00am CEST: Securing embedded systems and what AI has to do with it by Lejla Batina.

Lejla Batina is a Professor in the Digital Security (DiS) group. She joined the institute for Computing and Information Sciences (iCIS) at the Radboud University in August 2009. Before that she was PostDoc at KU Leuven Belgium where she also got her PhD in 2005. Before that she worked as a cryptographer for Pijnenburg Securealink (later SafeNet B.V.) in The Netherlands. She got her Professional Doctorate in Engineering from TU Eindhoven in 2001.

We will host our first WinC Seminar on November, 2023.

We will have this amazing set of speakers:

The talks are:

8th of November at 15.00pm CET: Experiences from a cryptographer by Elette Boyle.

Elette Boyle is the Director of FACT Research Center, a senior scientist at NTT Research and an associate professor at Reichman University (IDC Herzliya), Israel. She received her Ph.D. in Mathematics at MIT, under the guidance of Shafi Goldwasser (and Yael Tauman Kalai). During 2013-2015, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Technion Israel Institute of Technology, hosted by Yuval Ishai. During summer 2013, she was a short-term postdoc at Cornell University (Cornell Tech NYC), hosted by Rafael Pass. Before MIT, she completed her undergraduate work in math at Caltech. Her research interests include cryptography, computer security, coding theory, algorithms, and other areas in the foundations of computer science. Her awards include an ERC Starting Grant, Google Research Award, and Best Paper CRYPTO 2016.
15th of November at 11.00am CET: Non-malleability and Universal Composability of zkSNARKs by Chaya Ganesh.

Chaya Ganesh is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Automation at Indian Institute of Science. Before joining IISc, she was a post-doctoral researcher in Aarhus University, and prior to that she received her PhD from NYU's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. Her research interests are broadly in Cryptography and Security. More recently, she is exploring efficient zero-knowledge proofs and rational cryptography. She has won the IBM global university award, Google and Protocol labs research grants, Infosys Young investigator award and Intel Rising Star Faculty award. She helps co-organize Bangalore Crypto day.

You can re-watch the talk on youtube: WinC Seminar: Non malleability and Universal Composability of zkSNARKs - Chaya Ganesh
22th of November at 15.00pm CET: Post-Quantum Transition of Real-World Protocols by Nina Bindel.

Nina Bindel is a researcher at SandboxAQ, CA, USA, located in Germany. Before, she has been affiliated to the Technische Universität (TU) Darmstadt as a post doctoral researcher in the cryptoplexity group led by Marc Fischlin. Until early 2022, she has been affiliated to the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) as a post doctoral fellow at the Department of Combinatorics & Optimization at the University of Waterloo (UW) in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. She has been a research visitor at the lattice program of the Simons Institute at UC Berkeley in spring 2020 and she interned at Microsoft Research, Redmond (US), during the summer 2019. Before, she was a post doctoral researcher in the Cryptography and computer algebra group at TU Darmstadt, Germany, where she received her Ph.D. in September 2018 under the supervision of Johannes Buchmann from TU Darmstadt.

You can re-watch the talk on youtube: WinC Seminar: Post-Quantum Transition of Real-World Protocols - Nina Bindel
29th of November at 11.00am CEST: Making and breaking post-quantum cryptography from elliptic curves by Chloe Martindale.

Chloe Martindale is a Lecturer at the University of Bristol doing research on post-quantum cryptography. Her main research interests are in constructions and cryptanalysis of isogeny-based schemes, and, more generally, cryptography with foundations in number theory. Dr Martindale also works on the dissemination of scientific knowledge through her work in reviewing future standards as part of the crypto panel of experts for the CFRG and through public engagement at schools and public science events. Before coming to Bristol in 2019, Dr Martindale was a postdoc at Eindhoven University of Technology in the group of Prof. dr. Tanja Lange, and she did her PhD at Leiden University and Bordeaux University under the supervision of Dr Marco Streng.

You can re-watch the talk on youtube: WinC Seminar: Making and breaking post-quantum cryptography from elliptic curves - Chloe Martindale

If you want to join the WinC Seminar, send us an e-mail so we can add you to the discord channel, where you can find further information.

2nd Edition of WinC Seminar May/June 2024

1st. Edition of WinC Seminar November 2023

Organizers of WinC Seminar