Return from Real World Crypto Conference: Tabitha Ogilvie

This April, many CDT cryptographers headed to Amsterdam to attend the Real World Crypto conference. For many, this was our first ever conference, and for almost all of us, the first conference since before the pandemic. RWC itself had already been rescheduled from January of this year due to a surge in cases in the Netherlands.

RWC is intended as a conference for both academic researchers and industry professionals, with delegates from many organisations who design and implement cryptography in the wild. The program is designed to have talks with high real world impact - this year, the theme for the invited talks was Cryptography in the Ads Ecosystem, where representatives from Meta and Google Chrome spoke about their understanding and solutions to reconciling users’ privacy and effective advertising using cryptographic primitives.

It was really great to finally be able to attend a conference in person after so long! Although the pandemic has led to many conferences being held online, personally I was never able to manage sitting through an entire conference virtually: some combination of zoom fatigue, time differences, and the ever-tempting second monitor meant I would instead just seek out the talk, poster or paper most relevant to me. In addition, the all important coffee breaks after each session mean you can go beyond the presentation with the author and/or your colleagues, as well as network with potential collaborators. We also caught up with many ex-CDTers, who were attending RWC in their new roles in both academia and industry.

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