Elette Boyle, IDC Herzliya

Elette Boyle is an Assistant Professor at IDC Herzliya in Israel. Elette is interested in problems that bring mathematical elegance to the realm of the applicable. Her research centers in cryptography, including topics such as oblivious computation, homomorphic secret sharing, multi-party distributed protocols, and secure computation.

Elette will give us a “Homomorphic Secret Sharing mini-tour” during her CrossFyre talk. Homomorphic Secret Sharing (HSS) is a form of secret sharing that supports local homomorphic evaluation on shares, enabling users to convert shares of s to compact shares of f(s) without communication. Many new constructions and applications of HSS have emerged in the last few years yielding surprisingly far-reaching implications---from efficient private database manipulation and low-communication secure computation protocols, to worst-case to average-case complexity reductions.

This talk will serve as an introduction and brief tour into this expanding line of research.

Oded Goldreich, Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel

Oded Goldreich is a Professor of Computer Science at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. His research interests lie within theory of computation, specifically the interplay of randomness and computation. He is widely known for his contributions to the foundations of cryptography.

In this interview, we will hear Oded's opinion on challenges and chances of young researchers on their way to tenure.

Bianca Prietl, TU Darmstadt

Bianca Prietl holds a PhD in sociology and is currently employed at the department of sociology at Technical University Darmstadt. She is a scholar in Science and Technology Studies, Gender Studies and Qualitative Social Research. Her research focuses on masculinity constructions in engineering, feminist design of technical artifacts, algorithmic discrimination, and social relations of power and inequality in the context of digitalization and datafication.

This talk will focus on women in computer science from a social science and gender studies perspective. It will start by taking a closer look at the gendered structure of computer science and the cultural symbolisms surrounding this field of work. Going forward, it will discuss how society’s association of technology with masculinity affects women’s participation in computer science: How to understand women’s underrepresentation in computer science throughout the global north? What does it mean to work as a woman in computer science and what challenges these women confronted with due to their gender-related minority status? And what strategies of dealing with this social situation have been identified? The overall aim of this talk is to provide a vocabulary with which to articulate experiences of marginalization by sharing insights from social science research on gender and computer science.