over the hump
work
Made it halfway through the semester! This was a particularly crazy week for me, too. I gave a presentation on Monday to the ACC Seminar about Private Information Retrieval, which seemed to go pretty well. It was really interactive, so I hope the people that attended were able to get something out of it. For people interested in a short rendition of some major open problems in PIR, I've uploaded the slides here. On Thursday, I also had to give a brief non-technical talk to the SES board of advisors at Stevens, along with two other new faculty members. That talk also went well, but it's a bit harder to gauge since I've never given a talk like that.
Other than the talks, I also got to meet 1-on-1 with an undergrad and meet a fair number of the cybersecurity undergraduate majors! I really appreciate the chance to interact with the Stevens student population. I'm not teaching this semester, so any chance I get to feel more integrated with the school's community is welcome. I met some other students that are interested in research and ones that will be in my class next semester, and I'm excited to talk with them all again soon!
Research has also been pretty crazy. We're trying to get two papers out, and the project I started with Jaspal got very interesting quickly. Hopefully, we get the papers out early next week, which will free myself up to work on even more new things.
non-work
My non-work life has been pretty dry this week, because I've been busy. I'm still consistently listening to the Obelisk Gate while I run. And I try to set aside time to relax every evening when I can. My only accomplishment really was beating the final boss of Hades 2 last night. This weekend, though, I'll hang out with my friend and shop for some more winter clothes. That should be a nice break from the stress of the week.
questions
How does Homomorphic Secret Sharing relate to other cryptographic primitives?
It's known that HSS of some varieties can be build from DDH and is unknown from one-way functions
Does strong HSS imply public-key encryption? Oblivious transfer?
Thanks for reading to the end! It wasn't an eventful week, so here's another picture of my kitten.
