I wanted to survey some of the recent results regarding zero-knowledge proofs for legacy signature schemes like ECDSA. The main motivation for such a primitive has been the EU’s recent push for privacy-forward identity systems. In both this EU regulation, and a recent tender offer to develop age-assurance solution, the EU has codified the need for ZK proofs about identity attributes. While the crypto community has been tackling the problem of asserting identity attributes (e.g., age-over-18) for decades via the notion of anonymous credentials, deploying such anonymous credentials at scale will require a few critical new pieces. In my opinion, the only viable path is to develop ZK for legacy signature schemes like ECDSA. ...
Goosy Goosy on the 6.5
Someone pointed me to the All-In Podcast a few weeks ago. I listen on Saturday mornings at 1.5x because the four-square merry banter reminds me of Entourage. You know, Vinny, Eric, Drama, and Turtle… Vinny made an interesting point in E118 on March 3 2023, humble bragging that Credit Suisse offered him 6.5% interest on 3 month bills! (Well, the offer was to all private banking customers). He goes on trying to make some other point. ...
Staying in Peter Zumthor's House
Peter Zumthor and his family rent three wooden cabins in the Swiss village of Leis and we were lucky enough to spend a weekend there in Nov'21. Zumthor also designed thermal baths in Vals that are formed from massive slabs of local stone. Visiting an Architect’s wooden house About 15min and 500m above the center of the town of Vals, in the Canton of Grisons in Switzerland, one finds the village of Leis with only a handful of houses and a church. Peter Zumthor has built 3 wooden structures in this village, and his family rents them! In the picture below, the highest left-most modern wooden structure is named Oberhus, and staying in it was one of my favorite experiences of living in Switzerland. ...
Applying for a faculty job in CS
Working in academia is a privilege. I’ve been on the (tenure track) hiring committee for computer science at Northeastern University during the past few years and wanted to share personal notes on the process. If you are on the market, I hope this helps, and of course, please consider applying to Northeastern. TLDR First, in summary: Be succinct. Reach out to people you know. Apply even if you think you are not ready. Many schools including ours now offer various forms of fellowships for scientists who are early in their career. Make your application succinct Last year, our hiring committee evaluated at least 600 applications for 7 tenure-track lines (some were joint appointments). Each application received several reviews, with the top 150 receiving at least 3. At this stage, however, the committee members I informally polled spent about 10–15 minutes to read through an application package. ...