• You may be interested in our Seminar FAQ

The following is the time table of the seminar. The exact dates of the talks will be published on a later date.

For the seminar, you will have to write an essay, two reviews of essays other students wrote, and give a talk about your topic. After receiving the peer reviews of your essay you will have the option to make changes to your paper to incorporate the reviews (this is not mandatory).

Your overall grade will be composed of individual grades for you initial essay submission, your presentation, the reviews you wrote, and how well you incorporated reviews into your final submission.

• Optimal differentially private mechanisms for randomised response
• Optimal Differentially Private Algorithms for k-Means Clustering
• Privacy Preserving Collaborative Filtering via the Johnson-Lindenstrauss Transform
• Differential Privacy for Collaborative Filtering Recommender Algorithm
• Integrity Protection for Revision Control
• Balloon: A Forward-Secure Append-Only Persistent Authenticated Data Structure
• Transparancy Logs via Append-Only Authenticated Dictionaries
• Authenticated Hash Tables
• How to Authenticate Graphs Without Leaking
• Optimal Verification of Operations on Dynamic Sets
• Efficient Fork-Linearizable Access to Untrusted Shared Memory
• Foundations of Group Signatures: Formal Definitions, Simplified Requirements, and a Construction Based on General Assumptions
• Short Group Sinatures
• Protecting Privacy Against Location-Based Personal Identification
• Protocols for Checking Compromised Credentials
• MemGuard: Defending against Black-Box Membership Inference Attacks via Adversarial Examples
• Trading Accumulation Size for Witness Size: A Merkle Tree Based Universal Accumulator Via Subset Differences
• Octopus: A Secure and Anonymous DHT Lookup
• Updatable Oblivious Key Management for Storage Systems
• Zero-Knowledge Sets with short proofs

Due to the SARS-CoV2 pandemic this will be held as an online seminar.  This has several implications. Any communication in the course of this seminar will be digital. That is via eMail or video conferencing software. In particular, this also holds for the talks you will have to give. You can only participate in this seminar if you can present you own talk and attend the talks of other students via a video conference software. The concrete technological solution used will the announced on a later date.

Essay

Your essay should be 10 to 12 pages. The deadline for the initial and final versions of the essay is shown in the table at the top. It should be in the style of a scientific paper. If you like, you can use our LaTeX templates as a starting point. 

We will grade the initial submission of the essay. While there is a possibility for you to improve your grade with the final submission, if the initial submission is graded as fail, you will fail the seminar.

Talk Video

In addition to your essay, you have to submit a video of your talk. You do not need to capture images of yourself speaking - an audio track over slides is sufficient. Your talk should be roughly 30 minutes long and present your topic to the other students.

Reviews

The reviews of other students' essays should be in the style of a scientific peer review. We will provide some form of rough guideline on what this means (although there is a lot of material on this available online). Note that your reviews do not factor into the grade of the papers you are reviewing. However, they will factor into your own grade. So try to write a helpful and honest review.

After you received the reviews of your essay, you will have the option to submit a final version of your essay. You can improve your own grade by incorporating useful advice you received in your reviews.

Furthermore, you have to write brief reviews of other students' talks. As with the essay reviews, these do not factor into the grade of the student you are reviewing, but into your own grade.