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C4DT Conference on Disinformation, Elections and AI

October 1st, 2024, 09h30-17h30, SwissTech Convention Center, EPFL Introduction In 2024, more than 50 national elections are taking place or have already taken place across the globe, from Taiwan’s presidential elections in January, to India’s Lok Sabha election staged over seven phases from April to June, to the US presidential elections in November. Meanwhile, the (…)

Paris Cyber Summit 2024

A European summit to discuss how to build trust in cyberspace, encompassing topics like strategic autonomy and digital sovereignty. All this is to prospect a way in future scenarios of the cyber sector, while strengthening relations between various stakeholders, based on shared European values.

CPDP – AI 2024

CPDP is a non-profit platform originally founded in 2007 by research groups from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, the Université de Namur and Tilburg University. The platform was joined in the following years by the Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique and the Fraunhofer Institut für System und Innovationsforschung and has now grown into a platform carried by 20 academic centers of excellence from the EU, the US and beyond.

The Swiss Confederation E-ID Public Sandbox Trust Infrastructure – Part 2

The Swiss E-ID Journey This article is the second in a series of three articles which discusses C4DT’s experiences and takeaways testing the Swiss Confederation Public Sandbox Trust Infrastructure, hereafter abbreviated as “sandbox”. In the first article, we looked over all the components of the sandbox, and its setup. In this article we delve deeper (…)

Swiss Critical Infrastructure Data in the Cloud

May 28th, 2024, 09h15-12h00,EPFL by invitation only Introduction Ensuring the secure transmission and storage of vital data, imperative for societal, economic, and governmental functions, is a growing concern among politicians. The proliferation of cloud computing underscores the urgency of addressing this issue, making it a central focus in discussions on digitalization security. Acknowledging data’s central (…)

Symposium Valaisan de la Donnée

Jointly organized by Trust Valley and Groupe Mutuel, the Symposium Valais is part of the Tech4Trust Roadshow event series, which supports startups in the field of cybersecurity and digital trust. C4DT’s own Prof. Jean-Pierre Hubaux will be keynoting the event. During this Roadshow, expect insightful panel discussions and engaging startup pitches, and discover the issues and challenges related to Ethical & Explainable AI, economy of data, data privacy, data security.

DISCO-DHRIVE: Distributed Collaborative Learning for Data-driven Humanitarian Response in Insecure and Volatile Environments

DISCO-DHRIVE is developing a privacy-preserving collaborative learning platform using AI. It allows the building of AI models across different locations without the need to share sensitive data. Tailored to meet ICRC’s unique challenges, including resource scarcity and stringent data confidentiality, the project integrates federated and distributed learning. This approach enables the extraction of valuable insights from sensitive data without compromising their security.

Introducing D-Voting

  Six years ago, EPFL rolled out an e-voting platform developed by Bryan Ford’s DEDIS lab for its internal elections [2]. The then newly-formed Center for Digital Trust (C4DT) brought this project as one of the first under the umbrella of its Digital-Trust Open Platform, the precursor to what is today the C4DT Factory – (…)

The Limits of Privacy-Preserving Data Publishing

This project underscores the need for a paradigm shift in data privacy policies, acknowledging the inherent trade-off between data utility and privacy that current Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) cannot fully mitigate. It highlights the limitations of PETs and the systemic responsibility issues within the data supply chain, where technology producers often evade accountability. Consequently, a shift towards a data-use case-centric evaluation framework is recommended, one that prioritizes utility while minimizing leakage through nuanced risk assessments. Finally, the porject calls for greater transparency and a redefined accountability structure in the data sharing ecosystem.

Book Review: Digital Empires. The Global Battle to Regulate Technology (2023)

This book offers an in-depth, objective analysis of the three dominant regulatory models for digitalization—market-driven by the US, state-driven by China, and citizen-driven by the EU—and their global impacts on data, digital platforms, and the internet, highlighting the current geo-political struggles and possible future scenarios.

Unified Accelerators for Post-Moore Machine Learning

The slowdown in Moore’s Law has pushed high-end GPUs towards narrow number formats to improve logic density. This introduces new challenges for accurate Deep Neural Network (DNN) training and inference. Our research aims to bring novel solutions to the challenges introduced by ubiquitous ever-growing DNN models and datasets. Our proposal targets building DNN platforms that are optimal in performance/Watt across a broad class of workloads and improve utility by unifying the infrastructure for both training models and inference tasks.

PET Links

The C4DT Factory team selected some Privacy Enhancing Technology (PET) links for you. They are all related to digital trust: security, privacy, trust in general, we have you covered!

The Swiss Confederation E-ID Public Sandbox Trust Infrastructure

This is the 1st part of a series of articles: The Swiss Confederation E-ID Public Sandbox Trust Infrastructure The Swiss E-ID Journey C4DT Demonstrator using the Swiss Public Sandbox Trust Infrastructure Empowering Digital Identities: The SSI Protocol Landscape Switzerland’s E-ID journey so far In 2021, the Swiss E-ID law proposition was rejected by a public (…)

The Swiss Confederation E-ID Public Sandbox Trust Infrastructure – Part 1

Switzerland’s E-ID journey so far In 2021, the Swiss E-ID law proposition was rejected by a public referendum. The reason for the refusal was due to privacy concerns in the implementation and management of that system. In a nutshell, the idea that a private entity would be in control of users’ data was frowned upon. (…)

Implementation of Multicloud Strategies

May/June [tbc}, 2024, 10h00-12h00online Introduction The adoption of multicloud architectures is a strategic response to evolving organizational needs in today’s digital landscape. Motivations for this transition include mitigating risks, such as disaster recovery and business continuity. Diversifying across multiple cloud providers enables organizations to weather potential service outages by seamlessly shifting services to maintain business (…)

Applied Machine Learning Days 2024 – Open-Source AI Models

The Open-Source AI Models track draws attention to the pivotal role that open-source AI models play in the responsible development of artificial intelligence and highlights the challenges that this field faces, including ethical and responsible usage of AI models, sustainability, and licensing and legal issues.

Applied Machine Learning Days 2024 – AI Safety

The AI Safety track addresses the pressing need for responsible AI usage beyond sensationalized risks. While global leaders address extreme threats, the track spotlights often-overlooked but crucial challenges, such as bias mitigation, individuals’ privacy protection, generation of inaccurate or fabricated information, and AI alignment with human values. It serves as a platform for experts from diverse fields to share insights, tackle challenges, and suggest solutions for a safer, human-centric, and trustworthy AI future.

Exploring the Digital Chessboard: The US, China, and EU’s Approaches to Privacy and Security Governance

By Melanie Kolbe-Guyot, Head of Policy, C4DT   It is no secret that we are in the midst of an intense technological rivalry among the great powers of the United States, China, and the European Union; a rivalry that encompasses economic, security, and geopolitical dimensions. The development, control, and weaponization of digital technologies has become (…)

Implementation of Private Cloud based on Open-Source Cloud Stack

February 29th, 2024, 10h00-11h45online Introduction In today’s rapidly evolving technological landscape, the adoption of private cloud solutions has become a strategic imperative for many organizations seeking enhanced security and control over their data. Additionally, by opting for an open-source cloud stack as the foundation of their private cloud solution, they commit to achieving greater transparency (…)

Blockchains and NFTs are not dead (yet)!

Maya Frühauf of the Education Outreach Department of EPFL asked the C4DT to participate in a 1-day NFT workshop. The Collège Sismondi from Geneva organized a special “semaine informatique” for its students. The C4DT Factory prepared a hands-on workshop to show how to use NFTs. Habiba Zürcher created a project where the students made artwork (…)