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GymInf – Sécurité et Confidentialité

Course given under the GymInf program of swissuniversities by Linus Gasser.

Subjects for the course:

– why your opinion is worth money
– abusive data collection on personal devices
– protecting internet connections using TLS
– usefulness of blockchains for the decentralization of trust
– homomorphic cryptography for secure data sharing
– legislation on security and privacy in Switzerland, Europe, and elsewhere

Disco

Disco is a framework to implement machine learning algorithms that run in a browser. This allows testing new privacy-preserving decentralized ML algorithms.

Tandem

The Tandem / Monero project is a collaboration with Kudelski. It secures private keys in a privacy-preserving way.

Applied Machine Learning Days – AI & Healthcare

The track “AI & Healthcare” aims at bringing together researchers from academia, public health, start-ups and industry to share experiences and best practices, to jointly discuss the potential of AI in the transformation of healthcare towards a trustworthy system with improved patient and society outcomes.

Applied Machine Learning Days – AI & Cybersecurity

In this track, we explore the role of AI for cybersecurity – its blessing and its curse – and how the private sector, government and academia should collaborate to reduce the threat landscape of AI systems as well as to isolate them with safeguard mechanisms that make it easy to shut down if things start to go wrong.

`derive_builder`: usage and limitations

Basics The builder pattern is a well known coding pattern. It helps with object construction by having a dedicated structure to help build the other. It is usually used when many arguments are required to build one. The example codes are written in Rust, but the concepts behind these can be applied to many languages. (…)

[FR] Chelsea Manning: «J’ai plus d’accès à la guerre en Ukraine avec mon laptop que je n’en avais en Irak»

Dès le lundi 7 mars, Heidi.news invite à prendre de la hauteur par rapport à la guerre en Ukraine et son flot incessant d’informations. Pour cette «semaine des spécialistes», nous sommes partis à la recherche d’esprits aiguisés pour nous aider à mieux comprendre ce qui se joue là, sous nos yeux, à notre porte. Ancienne analyste de l’armée américaine, Chelsea Manning était de passage à l’EPFL pour une conférence co-organisée par la Trust Valley sur le thème du futur des données et de la vie privée en temps de guerre. Heidi.news l’y a rencontrée.

David Atienza elected Chair of the EDAA

Prof. David Atienza, head of the C4DT affiliated Embedded Systems Laboratory (ESL) at EPFL School of Engineering and new Director of EcoCloud, has been elected as Chair of the European Design and Automation Association (EDAA). The EDAA pursues educational, scientific and technical activities for the advancement in the international community of electronic design and design automation.

Privacy-Enhancing Technology Summit Europe 2022

Privacy, security, and regulatory constraints create difficulties for data-driven projects. This includes initiatives involving sensitive data being processed, accessed, monetised, bought, sold, shared, aggregated, or analysed. To unleash the power of sensitive data for these functions, Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs) are being deployed by many different sectors. Industries benefiting range from financial services to healthcare to pharmaceuticals to (…)

Tyche: Confidential Computing on Yesterday’s Hardware

Confidential computing is an increasingly popular means to wider Cloud adoption. By offering confidential virtual machines and enclaves, Cloud service providers now host organizations, such as banks and hospitals, that abide by stringent legal requirement with regards to their client’s data confidentiality. Unfortunately, confidential computing solutions depend on bleeding-edge emerging hardware that (1) takes long to roll out at the Cloud scale and (2) as a recent technology, it is bound to frequent changes and potential security vulnerabilities. This proposal leverage existing commodity hardware combined with new programming language and formal method techniques and identify how to provide similar or even more elaborate confidentiality and integrity guarantees than the existing confidential hardware.

Invariant Federated Learning: Decentralized Training of Robust Privacy-Preserving Models

As machine learning (ML) models are becoming more complex, there has been a growing interest in making use of decentrally generated data (e.g., from smartphones) and in pooling data from many actors. At the same time, however, privacy concerns about organizations collecting data have risen. As an additional challenge, decentrally generated data is often highly heterogeneous, thus breaking assumptions needed by standard ML models. Here, we propose to “kill two birds with one stone” by developing Invariant Federated Learning, a framework for training ML models without directly collecting data, while not only being robust to, but even benefiting from, heterogeneous data.

[FR] Data et IA : comment les entreprises peuvent-elles générer plus de confiance pour leurs clients et utilisateurs ?

Olivier Crochat dirige le Center for Digital Trust, au sein de l’école polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne. Il revient sur le concept de confiance appliquée au monde digital avec un tour d’horizon des questions qui se posent aujourd’hui aux entreprises qui développent des services numériques basés sur la data et l’IA.

Swisscom Joins Nym Privacy Blockchain

Swisscom is joining the Nym network as a validator node. Nym is building the next generation of privacy infrastructure aiming to bring data privacy to all internet users. In doing so, Nym is leveraging blockchain technology to reward nodes that run the global privacy network.

Cyber-Defence Fellowships – A Talent Program for Cyber-Defence Research in Switzerland

To promote research and education in cyber-defence, the EPFL and the Cyber-Defence (CYD) Campus have jointly launched the “CYD Fellowships – A Talent Program for Cyber-Defence Research.”
The fifth call for applications is now open with a rolling call for Master Thesis Fellowship applications, and with a deadline of 14 February 2022 (17:00 CEST) for Doctoral and Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellowship applications. Both new applications and resubmissions are strongly encouraged.

hyperfine, benchmarks for CLIs

Some years ago, I was thinking that by directly look at code difference, I could estimate how faster it would run. I would reflect about complexity or how a given loop will be waay faster by precomputing some values. And of course, it is never that simple. Cache locality, threads synchronization and lock contention are (…)

Risk & returns around FOMC press conferences: a novel perspective from computer vision

I propose a new tool to characterize the resolution of uncertainty around FOMC press conferences. It relies on the construction of a measure capturing the level of discussion complexity between the Fed Chair and reporters during the Q&A sessions. I show that complex discussions are associated with higher equity returns and a drop in realized volatility. The method creates an attention score by quantifying how much the Chair needs to rely on reading internal documents to be able to answer a question. This is accomplished by building a novel dataset of video images of the press conferences and leveraging recent deep learning algorithms from computer vision. This alternative data provides new information on nonverbal communication that cannot be extracted from the widely analyzed FOMC transcripts. This paper can be seen as a proof of concept that certain videos contain valuable information for the study of financial markets.

Deep Learning for Asset Bubbles Detection

We develop a methodology for detecting asset bubbles using a neural network. We rely on the theory of local martingales in continuous-time and use a deep network to estimate the diffusion coefficient of the price process more accurately than the current estimator, obtaining an improved detection of bubbles. We show the outperformance of our algorithm over the existing statistical method in a laboratory created with simulated data. We then apply the network classification to real data and build a zero net exposure trading strategy that exploits the risky arbitrage emanating from the presence of bubbles in the US equity market from 2006 to 2008. The profitability of the strategy provides an estimation of the economical magnitude of bubbles as well as support for the theoretical assumptions relied on.

Deep Learning, Jumps, and Volatility Bursts

We develop a new method that detects jumps nonparametrically in financial time series and significantly outperforms the current benchmark on simulated data. We use a long short- term memory (LSTM) neural network that is trained on labelled data generated by a process that experiences both jumps and volatility bursts. As a result, the network learns how to disentangle the two. Then it is applied to out-of-sample simulated data and delivers results that considerably differ from the benchmark: we obtain fewer spurious detection and identify a larger number of true jumps. When applied to real data, our approach for jump screening allows to extract a more precise signal about future volatility.

OmniLedger email signup and recovery

We’re currently using OmniLedger for logging in to our Matrix-chat and to the c4dt.org website as users. This is explained in more details here: CAS-login for OmniLedger Account management in OmniLedger C4DT partner login Matrix on Mobile There were two elements missing: Automatic signup — in the current signup process, the C4DT admin team needs (…)