• Concrete dates have been added to the website.
• You may be interested in our Seminar FAQ, for example, hinting to our presentation about plagiarism and basic writing skills on YouTube.

In our seminar you will have to choose a topic to work on from a list of selected topics covering the subject of post-quantum cryptography. In order to facilitate your first steps and improve your understanding for the topics, we offer a few lecture-style talks, which take place in-person but are made available via YouTube, focussing on post-quantum cryptography and related basics. Caution: This is not an introduction into basic cryptography itself and we recommend that you should already be familiar with its basic concepts (for example, from ItC or FoC) and linear algebra when applying for the seminar.

During the seminar we will offer you online hangouts where you can talk to members of our research group and other seminar participants, e.g. to resolve problems, clarify questions, or just to talk to someone. After being assigned a topic, you are required to meet your (also assigned) advisor in at least one such hangout within a short timeframe. This is the first time you can talk about contents for the essay you have to write and the presentation you have to hold.

In particular, during your seminar work you will face the following major deadlines:

• Early draft: Get feedback for a first feature-complete version of your essay from your advisor. You can optionally also hand in a video of a first version of your talk. If you do that, you will also get feedback on the talk.
• Presentation: Give a talk to the other seminar participants. This will be graded.
• Submission: Hand in the final version of your essay, which will be graded.

For the dates and times, see the Panda course.

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

These topics are available via Panda.

Hangouts

We will host online 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 only have to attend once to talk to your advisor, 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.

For details and dates, see here.

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.

Talk

In addition to your essay, you have to give a live presentation. Your talk should be roughly 1 hour long including discussion time and present your topic to the other students. Thus, you should plan to talk for about 45-50 minutes.