• You may be interested in our Seminar FAQ

For the seminar, you will have to write an essay, record a presentation on your topic, write two reviews of essays other students wrote, and three reviews of other students' recorded presentations. 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 your essay submission, your presentation, the reviews you wrote, and how well you incorporated reviews into your final submission.

We offer a variety of privacy-related topics. We strongly recommend having attended some form of cryptography lecture prior to this seminar. 

We will send the concrete list of topics to choose from to participants via email.

Due to the ongoing SARS-CoV2 pandemic this seminar will be held as an online seminar.  This has several implications. Any communication in the course of this seminar is digital. That is via eMail or video conferencing software.

Writers' Hangout

We will host weekly online "writers' hangouts". At least one scientist from Prof. Blömer's staff will be present. The hangout is a place to (1) get writing done while (2) being able to ask questions and discuss arising issues directly. 

You don't have to (always) attend, but in our opinion, the best way to become a great writer is through immediate feedback and good discussions with experienced writers. So come hang out with us. Ask questions on your topic. Share your screen and ask for feedback on a paragraph you've written or a text structure you've outlined. Ask how to best manage writer's block. Ask what tools to use or how to fix this LaTeX error. Ask other students whether they can understand what you're writing. Or maybe just use this session to silently write your essay and sometimes listen in on discussions. 

Essay

Your essay should be 10 to 16 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. Note that we prefer you submit 10 pages of gold rather than 16 pages of mediocre writing.

We will grade the initial submission of the essay as pass/fail. If the initial submission is graded as fail, you will fail the seminar. Ultimately, the final grade of your essay will be decided by your final submission.

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 30-40 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 a 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' talk videos. As with the essay reviews, these do not factor into the grade of the student you are reviewing, but into your own grade. 

Easy Chair

We will handle the submission and reviewing process of your essays via EasyChair. This will give you hands-on experience with a system actively used in the academic publication process.