Privacy Supreme | Where the mind is without fear: Using encryption to ensure freedom | August 15, 2020, 12:00PM IST

Computers and networks now mediate a tremendous amount of our daily activity, ranging from shopping to health care to political engagement and even to friendship and romance. This trend of pervasive computation is expected to continue and even to accelerate for the foreseeable future. The primary currency of the internet – private information used by advertisers and others to gain insight into our lives – is a dangerous one and has meant that large companies devote significant resources to the procurement and analysis of such data.

Nation-state actors, now empowered by the same computational scaling factors and advances that have enabled a new generation of industry, are quickly using the same (and their power over these industries) to gain more power over their citizens. AI and pervasive computing now allows for tyranny at scale, facilitating bulk surveillance and individual-granularity profiling. Current legal structures are woefully inadequate to handle what is coming. In this talk, the speaker aims to outline this background, describe what rights we should even be looking for, and then suggest legal, technical, and civic measures we can take to ensure stable, long-term protections.

Register here: Where the mind is without fear: Using encryption to ensure freedom

Date and Time: 15th August, 12PM

Know Your Speaker:

Debayan Gupta is currently an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Ashoka University, where he teaches a course on security and privacy as well as an introductory programming class. He is also a visiting professor and research affiliate at MIT and MIT-Sloan.

Before coming to Ashoka, Debayan held an Extraordinary Faculty position in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, where he taught courses like 6.042, 6.006, and 6.046. He has a PhD from Yale and a bachelor’s degree from St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata.

Debayan’s primary areas of interest include secure computation, cryptography, and privacy. He also occasionally dabbles in number theory, complexity theory, robotics, and machine learning (and, on rare occasions, economics). He has helped start a number of companies in India and abroad, and as such, holds board positions in a number of start-ups. He also consults for and advises companies on cybersecurity, helping c-suite individuals understand and mitigate cyber-risk.

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Hi… Any link for the talk?

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Hey Arjun, we’ll email it to all registered participants soon :slight_smile:

Edit : The link is also available here.

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This is going on so well, Debayan is awesome. Shout-out to the team for all the hard work, the stream is working perfectly :clap:

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As youtube is not allowing to post the URLS in the chat, I will put a few here:

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Thank you Rishabh. Please let me know post the lecture what we can do better as well! This system has come a long way but there’s always scope for improvement :sunflower:

Also, ask your friends and family to join as well! :smiley:

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Thank you so much Kushal!

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This was a really great talk! Thanks for hosting this, it was really quite informative.

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The talk was very informative. One of my CS professors attended the session and she did comment that it was great. I might get some brownie points. A few friends had joined too. :joy:

PS: @kushaldas thank you for the xkcd link there.

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Thank you folks! Can’t wait to open up registrations for Privacy Supreme. I think everyone will really appreciate the speaker line-up :slight_smile: I’ll also share resources / reading material sent by Debayan here soon.