On March 13, 2020, as a consequence of the COVID-19 crisis, the organizing committee decided to postpone the next HES meeting (Geneva, May 7-8th) to a later date in fall 2020. More details will be announced as soon as we have them.
Based on the success of our previous standards meetings, and the founding of the HomomorphicEncryption.org group, we are pleased to announce the 5th HomomorphicEncryption.org Workshop, co-hosted by EPFL, Inpher and ITU. The workshop is targeted at application developers, security practitioners, and homomorphic encryption experts. Along with technical standards discussions, the program includes introductory sessions for more general audiences. The workshop is also a great place for PhD students to meet representatives from industry, government and academia. The goal of this meeting is to continue to advance the awareness and adoption of common standards across the Homomorphic Encryption community.
Important dates:
All dates have been postponed and will be updated soon.
Registration site open: March 8th, 2020
Poster submission deadline: April 10th, 2020
Registration deadline: April 20th, 2020
Meeting: May 7-8, 2020
Registration:
The registration site will be open on March 8th, 2020. Space is limited and will be designated to people in a first come first serve basis.
Poster submission:
If you want to present a poster at the HES meeting, please send a short abstract describing your poster or the PDF of the poster to hes2020@listes.epfl.ch with the subject “HES2020 Poster Submission”, by April 10th 2020. As there is limited space for posters, submissions will be evaluated and selected in terms of relevance, novelty and impact to the standardization community, developers and end-users of Homomorphic Encryption.
Location:
The workshop will be held in Geneva, at ITU facilities (Rue de Varembé 2, 1202 Geneva) (Google map). Located 2 minutes walking from the main venue of AI for Good (CICG).
Related events:
AI for Good 2020 will be held at the Geneva International Conference Centre (CICG, French acronym) on 4-8 May. This is an event that brings together approximately 3000 people, including representatives of AI research, business, government, civil society and international cooperation. The Homomorphic Encryption Standards (HES) meeting will be held in parallel during the last two days of AI for Good (with no overlap with plenary sessions), at the adjacent ITU campus and/or Campus Biotech.
The most relevant crypto conferences around the dates of the HES meeting are Public Key Cryptography (PKC), May 4th-7th, Edinburgh, Scotland, and Eurocrypt, May 10th-14th, Zagreb, Croatia. Both take place in Europe, with good connections with Switzerland/Geneva. There are several daily flights in and out of Geneva to and from these other conference locations.
Accommodation and Logistics:
ITU is located at the Places des Nations (Square of Nations), which is a stop on many bus lines and the main tramline 15. The recommended hotels that are close to ITU or close to a stop on the tramline 15 (or a direct bus to Place des nations) are (links default to Thursday 7 May – Saturday 9 May 2020, 1 Person):
- Intercontinental Geneve, 7-9, Chemin du Petit-Saconnex, 1211 Genève, Switzerland (Google, Booking)
- Warwick Geneva, Rue de Lausanne 14, 1201 Genève, Switzerland (Google, Booking)
- Hôtel ibis Genève Centre Lac, Rue de Berne 26, 1201 Genève, Switzerland (Google, Booking)
- Hotel ibis Geneve Centre Nations, Rue du Grand-Pré 33-35, 1201 Genève, Switzerland (Google, Booking)
- Hotel Novotel Geneve Centre, Rue de Zurich 19, 1201 Genève, Switzerland (Google, Booking)
- Hotel Cornavin, Boulevard James-Fazy 23, 1201 Genève, Switzerland (Google, Booking)
Notable lakeside hotels (with less direct public transport connections) include:
- President Wilson Hotel, Quai Wilson 47, 1211 Genève, Switzerland (Google, Booking)
- Grand Hotel Kempinski, Quai du Mont-Blanc 19, 1201 Genève, Switzerland (Google, Booking)
- Four Seasons Hotel des Bergues, (Google)
- Mandarin Oriental, (Google, Booking)
Geneva is a very compact city (<200K inhabitants), with a very high-quality public transportation system, trams run about every 3 minutes during commuting hours. Additionally, there are taxis, and Uber is available. (Lyft is not available.)
Upon arrival at the Geneva airport, in the baggage hall, next to the exit point are machines that provide free public transport tickets (see image below). These machines offer tickets valid on all public transport in Geneva for 80 minutes (trams, busses, trains, boats) from the time of ticketing.
The easiest way to get to Geneva city from the airport to the city is using the trains that depart from the airport. All trains go via Geneva main station, which is the first stop, called Genève-Cornavin (~7 minutes).
Organization:
Organizing Committee:
Mariya Georgieva (Inpher)
Juan R. Troncoso-Pastoriza (EPFL)
Bastiaan Quast (International Telecommunication Union (UN))
Steering Committee:
Kristin Lauter (Microsoft)
Vinod Vaikuntanathan (MIT/Duality Technologies)
Kim Laine (Microsoft)
Kurt Rohloff (NJIT/Duality Technologies)
Jung Hee Cheon (Seoul National University/CryptoLab)
Shai Halevi (Algorand Foundation)
Roy Zimmermann (ex officio, Microsoft)
Lily Chen (observer, NIST)
Contact:
If you have any questions, please contact the organizing committee at hes2020@listes.epfl.com. As this will be an interactive workshop, we will try to have opportunities for participants to share information that is relevant and appropriate to the HES community. Please send us an email if you have something you would like to propose to present at the workshop.