The ease of creating fake virtual identities plays an important role in shaping the way information—and misinformation—circulates online. Social media platforms are increasingly prominent in shaping public debates, and the tension between online anonymity and accountability is a source of growing societal risks. This article outlines one approach to resolving this tension, with “pseudonym parties” that focus on proof of personhood rather than identity. Pseudonym parties are a low-tech approach to important digital challenges, linking online activity to anonymous digital tokens that are obtained by being physically present at an appointed time and place.
The implementation and monitoring of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) has shown the critical role of data and technology to advance sustainable and inclusive development. The COVID-19 crisis has highlighted the importance of leveraging data and digital technologies to ensure a rapid, agile, and effective response to both the pandemic as it unfolds and the economic recovery in its aftermath. Data plays a catalytic role in informing targeted decision-making at the national and supranational levels while technology can be harnessed to realize new and innovative ways to implement tangible solutions on the ground.
Under the overarching theme of harnessing data and technology for development, this cross-sectorial dialogue will feature two complementary discussions. The first panel will focus on data for development, presenting the World Bank SDG Atlas and its innovative data visualizations, and discussing the role of data in leading a resilient recovery and achieving the SDGs. The second panel will focus on technology for development, presenting EPFL’s Tech4Dev initiative and showcasing best practices in technology transfer that can be adopted by multiple stakeholders in international development.
This Monday I presented the following article. It discusses blockchains shortcomings. Even if it has been written in 2018, it is still very up-to-date… What follows here is a very opinionated piece. As such it reflects the journey I did in blockchains over the past 6 years. And I’m sure I missed out a lot (…)
Concurrent programming is one the oldest and hardest issues in the Computer Science Book. For years, we have been using locks, big threads sharing the minimum, using optimistic reasoning for “how data will be updated”. And we are still stuck with the same issues of some part of the code “failing” to use the updated (…)
On March 7, the next Swiss referendum vote will be held, with votes on a ban for full face coverings, the e-ID Act, and the economic partnership agreement with Indonesia. As this national vote approaches, the EPFL election prediction tool, Predikon, is rolling out some improvements with new features.
We’ve been looking at the very nice https://gather.town and played around with it. Instead of having a fixed view of all participants, you can walk around and ‘meet’ different persons in gather.town. You can edit the space your liking. It looks very much like a very old-school Zelda: What I liked a lot about it (…)
NotifyMe is a new app that alerts people who attended an event where there was a risk of COVID-19 infection. The app, using technology developed in part at EPFL, in no way compromises users’ personal data. NotifyMe works well in conjunction with SwissCovid and is currently being pilot-tested at EPFL.
The management of IT infrastructure is a constantly evolving topic. A very interesting concept that emerged in the last decades is the idea of infrastructure as code: instead of configuring servers in an artisanal fashion, the process is formalized into definition files, which are then automatically “executed”. There are multiple advantages, notably: The files always (…)
While the SwissCovid proximity tracing app was designed as decentralized and privacy-preserving, adoption rates have been low, and non-users have cited privacy and data protection as the top reason for not adopting. Similar results have been seen in other countries. Given the potential benefits of such an app, and users willingness to use apps with less privacy and arguably less social benefits, this suggests a need for a better understanding of privacy along with a greater focus on generating digital trust in society.
IHEID’s Centre for Trade and Economic Integration and the Global Health Centre invite you to join them for a panel discussion on the privacy features of the proximity tracing apps, the implications of such tech for global health, and general privacy and online trust, with a view to the lessons learned, and what can be done better.
For more information please click below.
Tuesday, February 16th, 15h00-16h00 (CET), online
EPFL Professor Matthias Grossglauser has been awarded the grade of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Fellow, a notable recognition given to less than 0.1% of voting members annually.
Please click below for more info.
On the 7th of March the Swiss population will vote on a law the Federal Council and the Parliament have prepared establishing an identification system recognized by the Confederation: the e-ID. Opportunities that arise through digital identification will not only depend on a country’s implementation but also on the trust which its citizens have in its government and institutions. During the week of the 8th to 12th of March, which follows the referendum, we would like to
– discuss the eID law and compare it to the one already implemented by other countries,
– discuss the population’s trust and willingness to adopt a national eID,
– get the perspective of a Swiss Consumer group and learn about the tech implementation and perspective of a digital ID provider,
– hear researchers’ point of view on the implementation challenges, possible solutions and research trends.
Finally, we will try to identify and frame a challenge / use case on which the eID workgroup can solve with the support of research.
Please note that this is a C4DT community event only.
While votes seem to yield increasingly surprising results, such as the election of Donald Trump in 2016 or the Brexit vote in the UK defying pre-vote polls and initial vote counting predictions, Swiss vote results are swiftly being predicted by Predikon. We will follow the evolution of the project until the next vote, which will take place on March 7th. An article every month will enable you to observe the evolution of the project, (almost) live, accompanying Victor Kristof in the improvement of Predikon.
With the massive use of Fake News and the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the general public is aware that AI can harm democratic processes. But on its bright side, can machine learning help us to better understand and improve democracy?
Applied Machine Learning Days at EPFL in 2021 will consists of monthly thematically focussed conferences on machine learning and artificial intelligence with top speakers from around the world. The AI & Democracy track explores the challenges and opportunities that lie at the intersection of politics, law, and machine learning – beyond Fake News and Cambridge Analytica. Open Government Initiatives have opened access to vast amounts of data that political scientists, lawmakers, legal experts, journalists, and data scientists exploit to gain insights into political and legal processes.
For more information please click below.
Monday, January 25th 2021, 09h00-17h00, online
During this event the 4 associate partners, who joined the C4DT as part of the C4DT start-up program, will present themselves to the C4DT community. For two years Regdata, strong.network, Taurus and Xorlab will complement the already diverse group of partner companies through their start-up perspective and collaborate and share insights on trust-building technologies. Virtually meet them, learn about their activities and ask questions and discuss with your start-up(s) of interest in 4 concurrent break-out sessions.
This is a C4DT community event only.
This article looks into the optimizations of the golang compiler with regard to different usage of structs. It answers the following questions: Does it avoid unnecessary structure copies? Does it inline where necessary? To answer theses questions, I wrote a small example and decompiled it to see how well it behaves. For all the examples, (…)
We are excited to announce the launch of the C4DT start-up program. 4 start-ups have already been selected to join the C4DT community, consisting of 13 partners and 34 EPFL laboratories, to collaborate and share insights on trust-building technologies. For two years Regdata, strong.network, Taurus and Xorlab will complement the already diverse group of partner companies through their start-up perspectives. Their agility and innovation has permitted these start-ups to differentiate themselves in their respective fields. Please click below for more information.
We are looking forward to an exciting and fruitful collaboration.
Connection Failures There are some common reasons why the OmniLedger login can fail. So far we have seen the following ones: Corporate firewalls Private browser settings If you have a corporate firewall that blocks access to non-standard ports, the only thing you can do is to remove the VPN. This is often enough to let (…)
The Brussels Privacy Hub of Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) and the Future of Privacy Forum cordially invite you to the 2020 Brussels Privacy Symposium. 2 panels will discuss the research and the protection of personal data under the GDPR. The topic of the first panel is “Complex Interactions: the GDPR, Data Protection and Research”, while the sencond panel will discuss the topic “Using Sensitive Data in Research to Counter (Hidden) Bias and Discrimination”.
To view the full agenda & for more information click below to visit FPF’s Brussels Privacy Symposium webpage.
Wednesday, December 2nd 2020, 14:00-17:15 (CEST), online
The second wave of the COVID 19 pandemic is surging in the world. Many countries had high expectations from digital contact tracing as a means to improve the efficiency of the manual tracing. In this webinar renowned international experts present their research results and views on solutions for digital contact tracing. We critically discuss the deployed solutions with respect to their security, privacy and effectiveness. In particular, we discuss the risks and threats of using solutions that are provided by giant data collectors. The event is supported by the Collaborative Research Center CROSSING (funded by the German Research Foundation DFG).
Participation is free of charge. In order to register and to see the full agenda please click below.
December 1st 2020, 13h-18h30, online
The C4DT/Factory works to bring EPFL’s great ideas to our partners. We do so by working on the existing code created in the labs. Because most of the code written in the labs has the goal to create graphs in a paper, it is not directly usable in another project. For this reason we created (…)
IEEE International Symposium on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust (HOST) is the premier symposium that facilitates the rapid growth of hardware-based security research and development. Since 2008, HOST has served as the globally recognized event for researchers and practitioners to advance knowledge and technologies related to hardware security and assurance.
For more information click below.
Today, a global digital society is emerging through the transfer of data abroad on a massive scale. Some states, however, seem to be returning to national isolationism, encouraging local storage solutions so as to be less dependent on foreign infrastructures and platforms. Switzerland is debating the adoption of a ‘Swiss Cloud’ for certain categories of data, while our neighbors are considering a European strategy. In addition to the geopolitical dimension, this massive transfer of data in Switzerland and abroad raises questions concerning protection of our privacy and control over our data. This conference will examine the role of multilateralism in the search for global responses.
The Digital Transformation Office of the University of Geneva invites you to join its e-conference on “Control over our data: what role for international Geneva on data governance?” on Wednesday 18th of November.
For more information please click below.
French-language news paper ‘Le Temps’ published an opinion piece by C4DT’s Academic Director and Head of the LDS lab at EPFL, Jean-Pierre Hubaux, on trusting the SwissCovid app. Prof. Hubaux raises the point that the excessive focus on privacy protection has cast doubt on a tool which makes it possible to defend other rights. Read the article in French on ‘www.letemps.ch’ by clicking the following link.
We are delighted to announce a new date for the Data 2025 Conference which will take place in an online format.
This conference, organized jointly by the Graduate Institute Geneva’s Center for Trade and Economic Integration (CTEI) and the Center for Digital Trust (C4DT), will discuss what data is, based on technical and economic realities. It will start with the present, but look forward to the opportunities, and the challenges, that new technologies will bring for the year 2025.
For more information please click below.
