This week, in the last MC2 reading group meeting of 2018, we will have three speakers presenting their work on blockchain and human security behavior. For an early lunch, we will also have organic sandwiches, appetizers and drinks.
The first talk will be from Prof. Babis Papamanthou on 'Applications of Verifiable Computation in Blockchains and Cryptocurrencies'. Prof. Papamanthou will gave his keynote talk in Symposium on Foundations and Applications of Blockchain 2018. The talk will cover how protocols for verifiable computation can address the scalibility, security and privacy concerns regarding blockchain. (Find more details here: https://scfab.github.io/
The second talk will be from Wei Bai. This talk will cover challenges of using end-to-end encryption correctly by the non-expert users. Wei's paper takes a first step toward providing high-level, roughly correct information about end-to-end encryption to non-experts. (Find their Euro S&P paper here: https://ece.umd.edu/~
The final talk will be from Kelsey Fulton. In this talk, Kelsey will cover their work on what users have learned about computer security from mass media and how they evaluate what is and isn't realistic within fictional portrayals.
We are ending the year with three great talks, accessible for the general audience. Looking forward to see you all there!
Charalampos (Babis) Papamanthou is an assistant professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he joined in 2013 after a postdoc at UC Berkeley. At Maryland, he is also affiliated with the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS), where he is a member of the Maryland Cybersecurity Center (MC2). He works on applied cryptography and computer security---and especially on technologies, systems and theory for secure and private cloud computing. While at College Park, he received the NSF CAREER award, the Google Faculty Research Award, the Yahoo! Faculty Research Engagement Award, the NetApp Faculty Fellowship, the 2013 UMD Invention of the Year Award, the 2014 Jimmy Lin Award for Invention and the George Corcoran Award for Excellence in Teaching. His research is currently funded by federal agencies (NSF, NIST and NSA) and by the industry (Google, Yahoo!, NetApp and Amazon). His PhD is in Computer Science from Brown University (2011) and he also holds an MSc in Computer Science from the University of Crete (2005), where he was a member of ICS-FORTH. His work has received over 3,000 citations and he has published in venues and journals spanning theoretical and applied cryptography, systems and database security, graph algorithms and visualization and operations research.
Wei Bai is a Ph.D candidate in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Maryland, College Park. He is supervised by Prof. Michelle Mazurek. His research focuses on human factors in security and privacy, which combines seucrity, privacy and human-computer interaction. He is interested in understanding users’ security or privacy perceptions and behaviors, and designing or improving systems to be secure as well as usable.
Kelsey Fulton is also a Ph.D candidate in the University of Maryland, College Park. She is also being supervised by Prof. Michelle Mazurek.