Annual Colloquium 2014

Last Monday and Tuesday this year's most important event of the HGS Mathcomp (my graduate school) took place — the Annual Colloquium. Being part of the organising committee we stepped into the footsteps of the previous ACs and planned it as a short two-day conference with graduate students presenting their project and invited speakers from science and industry giving insight into a topic of current interest. This year we chose the topic for the external talks to be "Small World — Big Data" with speakers from SAP, IBM, the KIT in Karlsruhe and the HITS in Heidelberg. You can take a look at the program in the Book of Abstracts.

For me personally those days were quite stressful keeping things going as smoothly as possible, but it was really nice to see that the previous weeks of careful planning were finally paying off. We had positive feedback from many attendees and overall I really had a great time as well.

Apart from being part in the organising committee I gave a talk about free software and cryptography, titled "Everyday cryptography". In this talk I explained, why the currently used methods to chat or exchange emails are flawed and why and how cryptography can be employed to make the situation better. The slides with many links can be found below.

Link
O3.1 Everyday cryptography HGS AC 2014