We are organizing a weekly seminar, Meet-in-the-Middle, from 18th August 2021. This seminar is held on each Wednesday from 16:00. The aim of this seminar is to create the diversification of the knowledge and to share and explore new research ideas in Computer Science and Mathematics among the researchers and the students. Each week, a designated speaker from IAI (Faculties and Students) or from other institutes will be delivering the talk. A prior notice about the topic will be intimated a week before the talk.

Co-ordinator: Dr. Kausik Sengupta (kausik.sengupta@tcgcrest.org) and Dr. Avijit Dutta (avijit.dutta@tcgcrest.org).

Online Meeting Link: https://zoom.us/j/94711835023?pwd=VFArZkxXRVdHaXBXNUZVbS9zUnMwUT09

Meeting ID: 947 1183 5023
Passcode: 786769

Last Talk (29/12/2021):

Speaker: Dr. Dipayan Das
Affiliation: Post Doctoral Fellow, CISPA-Helmholtz Center for Information Security
Title: Digital Signatures from ID scheme: Lattice Challenges & Open Problems

Abstract:  A digital signature is possibly the most important public-key primitive after encryption scheme. One of the most natural ways to construct a digital signature scheme is to transform a three-round identification scheme (ID) into a digital signature. This is essentially done by the well-known Fiat-Shamir transformation. In this talk, I will first give a brief introduction to the average-case lattice assumptions. Then I will focus on the construction of ID scheme from the discrete log assumption (as in the Schnorr protocol) and try to achieve a similar protocol from lattice assumptions. We will see why the same analogy (that of the Schnorr protocol) doesn’t work in the lattice settings and how we can manage to achieve an ID scheme (and thus a digital signature) from lattice assumptions. Then I will discuss some open problems in this direction.

Links: [Slide] [Video]

Previous Talks:

• Speaker: Dr. Satrajit Ghosh
Affiliation: Assistant Professor, IIT Kharagpur
Date: 22nd December 2021
Title: In search for sub-linear PSI protocols
Links: [Abstract] [Board-Work] [Video]

• Speaker: Dr. Kuldeep Saha
Affiliation: Post Doctoral Fellow, IAI TCG CREST, Kolkata
Date: 08th December 2021
Title: Persistent Homolgy and Data Analysis
Abstract:  In recent times, various tools from algebraic topology are  being heavily applied to tackle problems in data analysis. Persistent homology, for the past two decades, has been one of the main tools. We shall  talk about the basics of persistent homology and some of its applications.
Links: [Slides] [Video]

• Speaker: Prof. Mridul Nandi
Affiliation: Professor, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata
Date: 01st December 2021
Title: Some Indifferentiable Attacks on Cryptographic Designs
Links: [Abstract] [Board-work] [Video]

• Speaker: Dr. Kaushik Chakraborty
Affiliation: Senior Research Associate, University of Edinburgh, UK
Date: 24th November 2021
Title: How to Secure your Cryptosystem with Key-Recycling even if P=NP
Links: [Slides] [Video]

• Name of the Speaker: Dr. Payel Sadhukhan
Affiliation: Post Doctoral Fellow, IAI, TCG CREST
Date: 17th November 2021
Title of the talk: Open set classification – when you predict more than what you learn.
Links: [Slides] [Video]

• Name of the Speaker: Prof. Samiran Chattopadhyay
Affiliation: Professor, IAI, TCG CREST
Date: 10th November 2021
Title of the talk: A Learning Experience in Performance Improvement of High Throughput Wireless Access Networks
Links: [Slides] [Video]

• Name of the Speaker: Mr. Arijit Shaw
Affiliation: Junior Research Fellow, IAI, TCG CREST
Date: 22nd October 2021
Title of the talk: CrystallBall: Gazing in the Black Box of SAT Solving
Links: [Slides] [Video] [Abstract]

• Name of the Speaker: Prof. Rana Barua
Affiliation: Visiting Scientist, IAI, TCG CREST
Date: 22nd September 2021
Title of the talk: On the equation $RX^2+SY^2\equiv 1\bmod N$ and its application to Cryptography
Abstract: We shall look at attempts at solving the congruence and how it has been used in constructing certain cryptographic primitives.

• Name of the Speaker:
Affiliation: Professor at Indian Statistical Institute, Bangalore
Date: 15th September 2021
Title of the talk: Quantum Mechanics- Looking back after 100 years
Links: [Abstract] [Video]

• Name of the Speaker: Dr. Prasenjit Majumder
Affiliation: Professor at DAIICT, Gandhinagar and Visiting Scientist at IAI, TCG-CREST.
Date: 8th September 2021
Title of the talk: Natural Language Processing: Miles to go
Links: [Abstract] [Slides] [Video]
• Name of the Speaker: Dr. Avijit Dutta
Affiliation: Post-doctoral Scholar at IAI, TCG-CREST
Date: 25th August, 2021
Title of the talk: A Brief Introduction to Zero-Knowlege Proofs
Links: [Slides]

• Name of the Speaker: (Inauguration talk)
Affiliation: Professor at ISI, Honorary Chairman at
Date: 18th August 2021.
Title of the talk: Some Interesting Ongoing Research Problems in Cryptology, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, and Mathematics.