HomomorphicEncryption.org Steering Committee

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Homomorphic Encryption

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Oct 24, 2019, 9:57:10 AM10/24/19
to Homomorphic Encryption, Kristin Lauter, jhc...@snu.ac.kr, Kim Laine, sh...@alum.mit.edu, lily...@nist.gov, vin...@mit.edu, kroh...@duality.cloud, Roy Zimmermann, Rohloff, Kurt

Dear Members of the Homomorphic Encryption Community,

 

I think we can be extremely proud of the 4 workshops we have run so far

And HES 1.1/2.1, the draft standard for HE security parameters which we approved in 2018 and which is now also available on eprint:

https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/939

and as an IACR News Item:

https://iacr.org/news/item/12532

 

We had a good discussion on governance at the 4th workshop. As was mentioned several times in the discussion, we actually already have a governance structure, with a Steering Committee and various working groups.  But we should continue to improve, including in the transparency of how we function as our community continues to grow and expand.  The primary mailing list now has more than 300 people and there have been about 70 self-funded participants in each of the HE Workshops 2,3, and 4.

After the first workshop, we created a Steering Committee consisting of essentially the 6 workshop co-organizers and group leaders who ran the three working groups to write the 3 white papers:

Kristin Lauter, Vinod Vaikuntanathan, Kim Laine, Kurt Rohloff, Jung Hee Cheon, Lily Chen,
with Roy Zimmermann (Microsoft) as an ex officio member.

For the 3 subsequent workshops, we chose location and co-organizers for each workshop in a kind of ad hoc manner.  We will improve the transparency of that process, but on the positive side, the results have been outstanding, with 3 very successful workshops, a thriving and collegial community, an approved public standard HES 1.1/2.1, and a lot of momentum and engagement going forward.  There is a trade-off between efficiency and formality, and so far we seem to have struck a good balance which preserves the spirit and intent of our community which we don’t want to lose.

 

We are updating the Steering Committee to consist of the following 6 voting members, with 2-year terms starting November 1, 2019:

 

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)

Plus:

Roy Zimmermann (ex officio, Microsoft)

Lily Chen (observer, NIST)

 

The responsibilities of the Steering Committee Are:

  1. Entertain proposals for host/location/date for the next workshop, select the co-organizers, and communicate the decision and plan to the community via the list.
  2. Together with co-organizers establish the agenda for the standardization workshops.
  3. Launch working groups to take care of certain work items.  Help set the schedule for completion and encourage communication between working groups where needed.  Announce the goals, members, and schedule for the working groups to the mailing list.
  4. Maintain the website and the Standards documents and the email distribution lists and manage social media presence.

This list of responsibilities is not long, and we mostly take care of it these via email discussions.

 

We actively solicit volunteers for the working groups and other work items at the workshops, and we are very grateful to all of you who have volunteered and are currently helping with various work items.  We will send out more frequent emails to the list about planning for the next workshop and about the formation of working groups and the posting of documents.

 

Thanks everyone, for helping to make this a success!

 

Best regards,

Steering Committee, HomomorphicEncryption.org

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