Shanghai, New York and a hot pink rabbit: January IOHK news round-up
3 February 2017 4 mins read
Shanghai, New York and a hot pink rabbit January IOHK news round-up - Input Output
Winter School on blockchain
The year got off to an invigorating start for IOHK when a team of its researchers arrived in a chilly Shanghai for the first ever Winter School on cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies.
The main hall at the university’s technology building was packed for the three-day event, with a cast of renowned cryptographers on the stage, including IOHK chief scientist Aggelos Kiayias. Professor Kiayias presented a double session on his work on proving the security of blockchain protocols. Jonathan Katz from the University of Maryland spoke on game theory, as well as chairing the event.
A lively panel debate on bitcoin, blockchain and their future, saw IOHK co-founder Charles Hoskinson take to the stage with his former collaborator at Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin.
Other speakers included Andrew Miller from the University of Illinois, Loi Luu from the National University of Singapore, Joseph Bonneau from Stanford University, Vassilis Zikas from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Hong-Sheng Zhou from Virginia Commonwealth University.
During a break in programming the IOHK delegation honed their taxi hailing techniques (Shanghai’s cabs may be empty but that doesn’t mean they will stop) to travel across town for filming. See the videos here.
Cryptography comes out of the classroom
Even earlier than Shanghai, IOHK researchers were already busy this January, at Real World Crypto in New York. The aim of the annual conference is to strengthen the links between academics and developers in the hope of bringing the latest research into commercial applications in areas such as the internet, the cloud and embedded devices.
Prof Kiayias, who is chair of Cyber Security and Privacy at the University of Edinburgh, is an organiser and member of the steering committee.
From its beginnings as a gathering of some 150 specialists a few years ago, the audience at Real World Crypto has now grown to almost four times that size.
“We’ve seen more people come each year,” says Prof Kiayias. “Our audience considers this to be the one of the primary events they go to, to get information about the applied aspects of cryptography.”
Russia-based Alex Chepurnoy also flew to the US for the conference for a presentation on a co-authored paper on blockchain efficiency.
The work, Improving Authenticated Dynamic Dictionaries, is written with Leonid Reyzin, Dmitry Meshkov, Alex and Sasha Ivanov.
Topics tackled at the conference included passwords, blockchain, and TLS, the transport layer protocol through which data is exchanged on the internet.
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