Norway Trip: Erin Hales

At the end of October, I went to Bergen for a week-long research visit to Simula UiB. I was visiting two collaborators to work on a research project which came out of discussions at the Edinburgh summer school that I organised together with Joe and Rachel this summer.

It was great to visit Norway again, after being in Trondheim earlier this year for Eurocrypt. This time, however, it was much colder, and quite a bit darker too! It's great to be able to travel again and visit other researchers, especially those at a similar stage of research to me. Having collaborators and friends around the world is like a bigger version of the cohorts we have in the CDT.


We discussed our research ideas, and broke several of them. It's much easier to argue about how the secret keys are distributed when you're in the same room with a whiteboard in it, as well as plentiful cups of tea!


As well as getting lots of work done, I was able to participate in the Norge Kryptoseminar, or the Norwegian Cryptography Seminar. This is an event for all PhD students across Norway (and me as a special guest/non-Norwegian impostor) to meet and hear about each others' research as well as from cryptographers in industry. I heard all about different research, including a presentation on isogenies which was given in Norwegian!


It was interesting to hear about how industry research activities look in Norway. Especially the speaker from the Norwegian equivalent of GCHQ, the National Security Agency or Nasjonal sikkerhetsmyndighet (NSM). The public view of Norwegians, and Norwegian cryptographers, towards the NSM is very positive, partly because much of their research is published and released to the public.


It wasn't all research. I managed to catch up with Carlos, who is now director of research at Simula UiB, and meet the other professors and PhD students in the department. We had daily fika, which is like a coffee break and chat, as well as two departmental seminars. We also enjoyed pizza as a conference dinner, and proved that it is possible to cook a proper meal in a hostel kitchen, as well as seeing something that might have been the northern lights, but almost definitely wasn't.



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