EcoCloud Annual Event
EcoCloud Annual Event
Registrations Open:
Date of the event:
24th May, 2022
Location:
Lausanne Palace Hotel
Rue du Grand Chêne, 7-9
CH-1002 Lausanne
+41 21 331 31 31
http://www.lausanne-palace.com
Program
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Sustainability Days 2021 Program
DAY 2/2: September 17th, 2021 |
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| 8:30 – 9:00 | Registration and Covid verification |
VIDEO LINK: Sessions 5 and 6Session 5 – IT Infrastructure & Circular Economy Moderator: Frederic Dreyer, Founder of FUSTIC, EPFL |
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| 9:00 – 9:25 | Speaker 1 – Holger Frauenrath Associate Dean for Industry and Innovation, EPFL |
| 9:25 – 9:50 | Speaker 2 – Nicola Farronato, Head of Innovation Team, Torino City Lab |
| 9:50 – 10:15 | Speaker 3 – Marc-Elian Bégin, CEO, SixSq |
| 10:15 – 10:30 | Coffee break |
| Session 6 – Use cases requirements workshop
Moderator: Frederic Dreyer |
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| 10:30 – 10:40 | Speaker 4 – Patrick Montier Smart City, Geneva (presentation  ) |
| 10:40 – 10:50 | Speaker 5 – Maxim Interbrick, COO, Sparrow Analytics (presentation ) |
| 10:50 – 11:00 | Speaker 6 – Ale Rojas, Tech4Impact, EPFL (presentation ) |
| 11:00 – 12:00 | Panel introduction and Q&A session |
| 12:00 – 13:00 | Lunch break – Standing lunch |
| 13:00 | End of the EcoCloud Sustainability Days |
Fighting Digital Disinformation: Is it a Case of “Too Little Too Late”?
Fake news on social media has been around for a long time, but it came to the fore in the wake of the 2016 US presidential elections. The alleged interference by Russia in driving social media toward the candidature of Donald Trump showed how so-called ‘news’ on Facebook and other social media platforms can be dangerously twisted to malign candidates and influence voters. With the 2020 elections just weeks away, the ugly specter of digital fake news figured prominently in a recent conference held by EPFL’s Center for Digital Trust (C4DT).
Experts on cyber security, fake news, and democracy called for an awakening among citizens and governments so that urgent heed is paid to this growing menace, which threatens the very essence of democracy. Dr. Rebekah Overdorf, a Postdoctoral Research Associate at EPFL’s Distributed Information Systems Laboratory, raised concerns about the manipulation of social media by vested interests. However, she emphasized that the problem is not US- or West-centric; rather, it is a global phenomenon. This is proven by her ongoing research on cyber disinformation and election interference in Kyrgyzstan, sometimes referred to as ‘the island of democracy.’ Following elections on October 4, there was a public outcry against widespread manipulation and voter suppression, which ultimately forced the prime minister to step down. Collaborating with local journalists, students and activists, Overdorf identified three methods of information manipulation: creating noise through fake social media accounts to drown out opposition, spreading disinformation through fake news to destroy trust, and performing malicious personal attacks.
Karl Aberer, faculty member of EcoCloud and Full Professor at the Distributed Information Systems Laboratory, went a step further by addressing the root of the problem: insufficient quality information and a surfeit of free, but often manipulated, news on social media. Digital literacy is the need of the hour, but time may be running out. Drawing a parallel with climate change, Professor Aberer said that we might soon be reaching a “point of no return” when democracies might be beyond redemption.
These alarming thoughts were echoed by Steve El-Sharawy, head of Insights at EzyInsights. He said that global manipulation is already beyond control. Although Facebook has deleted billions of fake accounts, it could only be the proverbial tip of the iceberg with many fake accounts still propagating misinformation on social media.
The conference, “Manipulating elections in cyberspace: Are democracies in danger?” was a joint C4DT – CyberPeace Institute – CTEI event that can be viewed at https://youtu.be/PVbwfO-qri4%20Target
Coming up: 2018 EcoCloud Annual Event
The annual mega event at EcoCloud is just around the corner. In little over a fortnight, the Lausanne Palace Hotel will be a buzz of activity as it hosts the two-day EcoCloud annual event, slated for June 18–19. The venue’s prime location, which offers panoramic views of the city, Lake Geneva, and the magnificent Alps, will be an apt setting for industry experts to share insights on budding data and cloud computing platforms.
This year’s event will feature industrial speakers and presentations by EcoCloud researchers. Session I (June 18) will focus on Security, Privacy & Trust (Chair: Bryan Ford), Session II (June 19, morning) will include deliberations on Systems (Chair: Babak Falsafi), and Session III (June 19, afternoon) will be themed around Analytics (Chair: Martin Jaggi).
In his keynote address, Úlfar Erlingsson (Senior Staff Research Scientist in the Google Brain team) will introduce Google’s work on addressing privacy problems in systems and deep neural networks as well as the RAPPOR and Prochlo mechanisms for learning statistics in the Chromium and Fuschia open-source projects. He will also present techniques for training deep neural networks with strong privacy guarantees.
In the industrial session that will follow, leading speakers from the IT industry will share their expertise. Simon Knowles of Graphcore will speak on designing processors for intelligence; cryptography expert Nick Sullivan of Cloudflare will share his findings about evolving web architecture and its impact on security, privacy, and latency; and Hong Wang of Intel Labs will address the question of reinvigorating foundational uArch research to boost IPC.
Interspersed with the astute observations of the industrial experts will be presentations by EcoCloud researchers on a range of topics such as distributed clinical and genomic data, distributed ledger technologies, using a central server to protect keys, durability for non-volatile memory, verified NAT, taming skew in large-scale analytics, the revelations of a “click,” machine learning, and taxonomy induction.
This is the seventh edition of the EcoCloud Annual Event. Like past years, the outcome of the interactions among researchers and industry stalwarts is bound to have a major bearing on future innovations in the cloud computing industry.