Today I Learnt (TIL): SASE [sæsɪ]- so what is it, how does it compare to a VPN, and should I use Tor? I heard about it from Ria at C4DT, who told me SASE is the new VPN.It might be better than VPN and will solve all the world’s problems. Well, first of all, what (…)
Digital privacy has become a top social concern for the expanding digital world. Societies are trying to define and navigate the future of digital privacy and determine technological solutions, new policies, and frameworks needed to protect individuals while maintaining support for digital services. There are several broad areas where the landscape is undefined, where policies still need to be developed, and where IEEE expertise may greatly impact the future of “privacy” on-line. The Digital Privacy Project is exploring how IEEE can best add to this discussion – bringing the perspective of technologists – to help advance solutions to protect personal and private information.
We will discuss how to bridge the gap in the availability of information relating to cyberattacks on the healthcare sector and how evidence-led accountability is an important contribution to reduce cyberattacks on this critical sector. Panelists will focus on how and whether understanding the scale and scope of attacks can improve decision making and operational and diplomatic initiatives to protect the healthcare sector.
At the C4DT Factory, one of our tasks is to develop demonstrators for research projects. The goal is to provide a quick introduction to a project, and allow visitors to interact and get a feel for the technology.
CLIs are very powerful, from the tip of fingers, you can quickly make the computer do anything you want. No need to wave your mouse around, hoping to find the right sub-sub-sub-menu where the feature you want is implemented. But it comes at a cost: for each command, you need to know how to write (…)
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 object, dead and soft locks with hard-to-see origins, and many many crashes.
The article Why Blockchain Is Not Yet Working goes over six points – for most of these points, research papers exist. For some of them test networks exist. Only one or two are solved in active main networks.
This conference will take place on October 15th, 9:00-17:00, at the Maison de la Paix of the Graduate Institute, Geneva (IHEID). It will address a number of key questions: How does a lack of digital trust manifest itself today? Is this justified, based on current privacy and security issues, or is it exaggerated? Understated? What lessons can be learned from other sectors on how to build the trust that will be needed for our digital future. What is possible in the digital future, and what will be lost without digital trust? And finally, how should that digital trust be built?
The event is jointly organised by IHEID’s Centre for Trade and Economic Integration (CTEI) and EPFL’s Center for Digital Trust (C4DT).
For more information click below.
To date the Pharma industry has not leveraged the wealth healthcare data volumes to deliver truly personalized care for patients.
On Monday 23rd of August the Applied Machine Learning Days (AMLD) hosts the AI & Pharma track, consisting of 4 sessions:
(i) methodological innovations in data science, ML and AI;
(ii) applications / use cases;
(iii) data sharing, ethics and privacy;
(iv) panel discussion on the adoption of AI in Pharma – solving the data Conundrum.
This track is co-organised by the Roche, Novartis and C4DT.
For more information click below.
To promote research and education in cyber-defence, EPFL and the Cyber-Defence Campus have jointly launched the “CYD Fellowships – A Talent Program for Cyber-Defence Research.” The fourth call for proposals is now open with a rolling call for Master Thesis Fellowship applications, and with a deadline of 16 August 2021 for Doctoral and Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellowship applications. CYD fellows are hosted by a higher education institution in Switzerland and conduct their research at the CYD Campus located on the premises of EPFL and ETHZ and in its office in Thun. For more details visit the program’s dedicated website by clicking the link below or join the online Applicant Workshop on 5 August 2021 from 10.00 to 10.45 CEST (for more information please contact research@epfl.ch).
If weakening encryption through legislation or judicial orders is not the right solution, are there other ways to reconcile privacy, security and public safety? How can policymakers ensure a coherent approach on apparently divergent policy objectives? What can the EU do to promote encryption? Can government agencies develop new investigative techniques without undermining encryption?
Trust in Innovation is a 100% digital event that will take place on June 16th , 2021. It targets SMEs wanting to understand and adopt new technologies such as Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence and Quantum Computing. It promises no sales speech but pedagogy and ROI. The key themes treated during the event are traceability, compliance, healthcare and tokenisation.
For more information click below.
Today, it’s often more cost-effective to host services in the cloud instead of in its own premises. But how protected is our sensitive data in the cloud? We readily encrypt data in storage and protect it while in transit. But what about when data is “in use”? It is a legitimate concern in increasingly cloud-dominated infrastructures. Moreover, how to make sense of the different laws governing the sensitive data?
During this week we will explore how privacy-enhancing computation technologies complement a zero-trust strategy by addressing the vulnerability of data in use in the cloud. We will also discuss the legal framework which is required to balance economical interest of companies with the individual’s data privacy concerns.
For more information click below
There is much debate about the use of digital immunity passports as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Such digital tools to certify immunity could help spur economic recovery, but raise ethical and privacy concerns. How to build trust in such a solution? What elements make them interoperable among countries? How is people’s data related to their immunity status governed?
A panel of prominent specialists will discuss these and other questions from 4 different angles – ethical, business, political/governance and scientific – during a two-hour moderated discussion.
For more information click below.
On the 7th of March, the Swiss population voted on a ban for full face coverings, the e-ID Act, and an economic partnership agreement with Indonesia. As with all Swiss referendums since 2019, the EPFL election prediction tool Predikon generated real-time predictions for the vote outcomes.
Digital activities represent around 4-5% of CO2 emissions, estimate several studies. And cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin, are amongst the most energy consuming activities: far ahead of streaming and email exchanges. The podcast “Le Point J” tries to understand why.
In communication systems, there are many tasks, like modulation recognition, for which Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have obtained promising performance. However, these models have been shown to be susceptible to adversarial perturbations, namely imperceptible additive noise crafted to induce misclassification. This raises questions about the security but also the general trust in model predictions. In this project, we propose to use adversarial training, which consists of fine-tuning the model with adversarial perturbations, to increase the robustness of automatic modulation recognition (AMC) models. We show that current state-of-the-art models benefit from adversarial training, which mitigates the robustness issues for some families of modulations. We use adversarial perturbations to visualize the features learned, and we found that in robust models the signal symbols are shifted towards the nearest classes in constellation space, like maximum likelihood methods. This confirms that robust models not only are more secure, but also more interpretable, building their decisions on signal statistics that are relevant to modulation recognition.
Cyber security information is often extremely sensitive and confidential, it introduces a tradeoff between the benefits of improved threat-response capabilities and the drawbacks of disclosing national-security-related information to foreign agencies or institutions. This results in the retention of valuable information (a.k.a. as the free-rider problem), which considerably limits the efficacy of data sharing. The purpose of this project is to resolve the cybersecurity information-sharing tradeoff by enabling more accurate insights on larger amounts of more relevant collective threat-intelligence data.
This project will have the benefit of enabling institutions to build better models by securely collaborating with valuable sensitive data that is not normally shared. This will expand the range of available intelligence, thus leading to new and better threat analyses and predictions.
Current digital trends and innovation, including artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, data privacy, blockchain and digital trust, are rapidly changing and disrupting the way donors, employees, and beneficiaries interact with each other. Technology can be a powerful tool for philanthropic and non-profit organizations, accelerating their digital transformation through automating and streamlining business processes, using digital platforms, and leveraging data and analytics in new ways that enhance their efficiency and social impact.
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 (…)
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 (…)
