This is a 7.5hp credits PhD-level course held by LTH. The course is in seminar-style: each participant will hold 1 or 2 seminars and actively participate in all other seminars. For quality assessment there are several additional tasks entailed with each seminar.
All seminars are held on Fridays 14:00-16:00, unless otherwise speciefied; are onlive (i.e., live + online) at this zoom link.
Date | speaker | paper title (link to paper) | link to report
| Date | Speaker | Paper Title | Report |
|---|---|---|---|
| Feb 26 | Samuel Wairimu | Website Fingerprinting with Website Oracles | |
| March 5 | Rohon Kundu | New Technique for Efficient Trapdoor Functions and Applications | |
| March 12 | Anders Konring | Can a Public Blockchain Keep a Secret? | |
| March 19 | Jing Yang | Modeling for Three-Subset Division Property without Unknown Subset | |
| March 26 | Syafiq Al Atiiq | NXNSAttack: Recursive DNS Inefficiencies and Vulnerabilities | |
| April 9 | Navoda Senavirathne | Sunrise to Sunset: Analyzing the End-to-end Life Cycle and Effectiveness of Phishing Attacks at Scale | |
| April 23 | Mathias Hall-Andersen | Compressed Σ-Protocol Theory and Practical Application to Plug & Play Secure Algorithmics | |
| May 7 | Ivan Oleynikov | Improved Primitives for MPC over Mixed Arithmetic-Binary Circuits | |
| May 28 | Rasmus Dahlberg | Merkle2: A Low-Latency Transparency Log System | |
| June 4 | Joakim Brorsson ⭐ | Perun: Virtual payment hubs over cryptocurrencies |
⭐ = students who have attended all seminars
| Time | Activity |
|---|---|
| 14:00-14:15 | take the quiz the first time |
| 14:15-15:00-ish | seminar presentation |
| 15:00-15:40-ish | research discussion, Q&A |
| 15:40-16:00 | take the quiz the second time and discuss the results |
The fisrt seminar will have all time slot shifted of about 30 mins (to accomodate for personal introductions/presentations).
- You select one paper from a top conference (see list below). Be sure to pick a work you find interesting and that has important contributions
- TWO WEEKS before your seminar slot: Send the paper details and a short summary of why you chose this work to me (Elena) Deadline, Friday by 11:00
- THE WEEK BEFORE: Write and send me a two-page report/review on the paper (see instructions below) Deadline: Wedensday by 13:00
- Get an approval for your choice by me. (if this does not arrive within 2 days, send me a reminder)
- Prepare a 50 minutes presentation about the work you selected
- Prepare a quiz to assess your peers' learning of your topic
- TWO DAYS BEFORE: send me (a link to) the quiz you designed and get my approaval Deadline: Wedensday by 13:00
- Deliver the seminar, be active in the discussion afterwards and reflect on the feedback you receive
The paper must be accepted for publication in one of the major conferences in the field no earlier than 3 years ago (e.g., you can pick a paper that appeared at CRYPTO18, CRYPTO19 and CRYPTO20, but not from 2017 or before).
Conferences that are OK by default are (in alphabetical order): ASIACRYPT, CHES, CRYPTO, CT-RSA, EUROCRYPT, PETs, PKC, IEEE S&P, TCC, USENIX.
If you wish to present a paper from a different venue contact me with a valid argument and I may make an exception.
Introduction - this should be high level and accessable to anyone, set the paper into a context and perspective
Main Contributions - presented in a way that any graduate student can understand the impact of the work
Technical Details - in depth explanation of some parts of the work
Critical Summary - personal take on the paper and the importance of its results
- The quiz should have 7 multiple choice questions.
- The first 3 questions will be worth 2 points and should be of a more general character.
- The last 4 questions are worth 1 point each and go deeper into the paper.
Everyone will take the same quiz twice. Once right before the seminar and once at the end of the research discussion. You can choose your favourite quiz platform (it might be fun to experiment with new things!) as long as:
- answers to quizzes are NOT anonymous (we want to be able to see every students' answers)
- the correct answer is are not immediately displayed (this is because the quiz will be taken twice)
- it should be possible to re-take the quiz (in the end of the lecture)
The structure of your report should be similar to a paper review:
- background knowlege (~1 page)
- summary of the paper's contributions (~0.5 page)
- importance of the presented results in the field
- what is good about it
- what is bad or could be improved
The report is expected to be 2-3 pages long.
For every seminar, half of the students will give a written feedback on the speaker's report, the other half gives a written feedback on the oral presentation.
Concretely: associate to every student its speaker number, e.g., Samuel =1 , Rohon = 2 etc.
For seminar/speaker n, students n-2,n-1,n+1, and n+2 (mod 10) prepare a written feedback on the presentation; everyone else writes feedback on the speaker's written report. All feedback should be emailed to the speaker (with Elena in cc) within 3 working days from the presentation (I suggest to do it on Friday, or the next Monday).
- Learning how to recongnize good papers;
- Training your ability to assess learning via quizzes;
- Exercising your presenter’s skills, both to a general/introductory level and towards more technical/detailed jeargon;
- Training your capacity to discuss and pose meaningful research questions in fields ‘around’ your main area of expertise;
- Expanding your horizons in terms of research areas, hot topics and open challenges;
- Improve your abilities of giving and receiving feedback;
- Starting to challenge yourself with how to assess others' learning (via quizzes).
To make sure you come prepared to the seminars, you will have to answer a quiz for every seminar. In addition, the speaker needs to provide a report on the chosen paper, and each attendee needs to provide a short feedack on each report or on the oral presentation.
1.5hp credit for preparing and giving a seminar (this corresponds to a full week of work: 25 hours preparing for the presentation; 3 hours for quiz-related tasks; 9 hours for writing a report; 2 hours for attending the seminar; and 1 hour to reflect on the feedback you receive)
0.75hp credit for preparing for, attending and giving feedback to a seminar (this corresponds to almost 3 days of work: 12 hours studying the paper, preparing for the quiz and the post-seminar discussion; 5 hours for writing feedback; and 2 yours for attending the seminar)
Attend and give enough seminars to gain 7.5 credits:
1.5hp x 1 + 0.75hp x 8 = 7.5hp (1 seminar given, 8 seminars attended) -> you can skip up to 1 meeting.