Colloquia / Seminars / Industry Talks

Many information processing tasks involve sensitive private data from multiple participants. Security leaks, as highlighted by several prominent recent cases, make participants reluctant to provide this data.

One elegant solution to security leaks is to distribute computation among the entities holding the data and thus never explicitly share the data. I show two types of secure multiparty computation protocols that allow computation without putting any private information at risk, and discuss their application to double auctions and scheduling.

Boi Faltings is a full professor of computer science at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), where he heads the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. His main research contributions are in the area of qualitative and model-based reasoning, case-based reasoning, constraint programming, and distributed problem-solving. He has co-founded 6 companies in e-commerce and computer security and acted as advisor to several other companies world-wide. Prof. Faltings has published over 300 refereed papers and graduated over 25 Ph.D. students, several of which have won national and international awards. Boi Faltings is a fellow of the European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence. He has served as head of the computer science department from 1996-1998 and as head of the Institute of Core Computing Sciences from 2005-2008. He holds a Diploma from ETH Zurich and a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.