SPEAKERS

Nagib Aouini holds a Master’s Degree in Computer Science, Applied Mathematics, and Cryptography from the French university ENSIMAG. He is a former CISO at SEBA Bank which is one of the 1st licensed crypto bank. In 2020, Nagib founded DuoKey a cybersecurity startup focus on encryption and key management using SEPIOR MPC technology, which enables customers to confidently move sensitive workloads to the cloud where they can benefit from strong security controls that help meet internal and external compliance requirements.

Nagib has more than 20 years of experience in the field of digital identity and smartcards and has proven experience in the implementation of complex technical projects with high added value. Previously, he held key positions in several large companies specializing in digital security, such as Gemalto, Thales Security, and Accenture. Nagib has worked with governments on large-scale ID projects (e.g. the French Ministry of the Interior on the biometric e-passport project, the Kingdom of Morocco on the biometric identity card program, and the US Department of Defense [DoD] on the CAC access card program)

Dr. Dan Bogdanov met his first significant privacy challenges while working with the data collection systems of the Estonian Genome Center. This inspired him to start researching cryptographic solutions for privacy problems. He is the inventor of Sharemind, a secure multi-party computation system for collecting, sharing and processing private data. Sharemind is a new kind of computer that analyses digital data without seeing the individual values. This achieves beyond-the-state-of-the-art data protection, as has been demonstrated in various applications processing tax, education, genomic and financial data.

Dr. Bogdanov has been a research team lead for multiple privacy technology research projects with DARPA – an agency of the United States Department of Defense, European FP7 and Horizon 2020. He is the co-author of the ISO/IEC 29101 standard on the architecture of privacy-preserving systems and the ISO/IEC 19592 standard on secret sharing. Today, Dr. Bogdanov leads the Information Security Research Institute at Cybernetica, an Estonian company creating information security, e-Governance and maritime security solutions. He is a board member of the MPC Alliance, an industry organisation of companies developing and using secure multi-party computation technology.

Niek has 15 years of experience in cryptography and software engineering. Prior, Niek held senior research positions at TU Eindhoven, ABN AMRO, EPFL (CH), and CWI, focusing on privacy-preserving machine learning and secure multi-party computation. Niek has a PhD (’12) from Leiden University on quantum cryptography.

Dr. Jordan Brandt is the CEO at Inpher, a Secret Computing® company pioneering privacy-preserving analytics and AI. As a Technology Futurist, Jordan’s research and insight on cybersecurity, AI, and robotics have been featured in print and live broadcast internationally on Bloomberg, CNBC, Forbes, Financial Times, Wired and other business and technology press. Jordan is the former CEO and cofounder of Horizontal Systems, acquired by Autodesk (Nasdaq: ADSK) in 2011. He went on to serve as the director of Autodesk’s $100m investment fund, while also teaching and conducting research as a Consulting Professor of Engineering at Stanford University. Jordan completed his undergraduate work at the University of Kansas and his PhD in Building Technology at Harvard. In 2014 he was selected as one of Forbes ‘Next-Gen Innovators’

Benjamin is a Research Scientist on the Statistics & Privacy team at Facebook with a PhD in cryptography/mathematics. He works on designing protocols that are being used to rebuild Facebook’s ads systems to be more private.

My mission is to provide the most advanced digital asset management technology to a wide range of companies that have adopted cryptocurrencies.

As Sales Director at CYBAVO, we place emphasis on enabling digital asset operations, to build tools and processes that help organizations scale up and support large numbers of highly complex transactions.

Taher Elgamal is an internet security industry veteran. He is the inventor of the Elgamal Digital Signature scheme, which is the basis for Digital Signature Algorithm (DSA). While serving as Chief Scientist of Netscape Communications, he was the driving force behind SSL. Elgamal was the recipient of the 2009 RSA conference Lifetime achievement award.

Elgamal serves as the CTO, Security for Salesforce. Prior to, he was the founder and CEO of Securify and the director of engineering at RSA Security. From 1995 to 1998, he was the chief scientist at Netscape Communications. Elgamal has served and is serving on many public and private boards. He serves on advisory boards for many security and software companies.

Elgamal has a M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Cairo University.

Prior to co-founding Nth Party, Frederick worked as Associate Director of Engineering and Interim Director of the Software and Application Innovation Lab (SAIL) at Boston University. After starting at SAIL as the first Software Engineer, he ultimately became responsible for overseeing all operating aspects, hiring, and managing software development projects. SAIL was one of the first teams in the world to deploy an MPC platform with real-world users, and developed novel MPC solutions that run in the browser.

Dr. Andrei Lapets, currently Chief Science Officer and a co-founder at Nth Party, Ltd., was formerly Associate Professor of the Practice in Computer Science at Boston University, where he also served as Director of Research Development at the Hariri Institute for Computing and Director of the Software and Application Innovation Lab. In these capacities, he supported a broad community of researchers and external organizations as they envisioned and executed interdisciplinary computational and data-driven research efforts in areas such as digital health and bioinformatics, and was a collaborator in joint university-government initiatives.

Dr. Lapets has also served as PI and co-PI on multiple research efforts that were supported by sponsors such as NSF and IARPA and which involved the development, production deployment, and evaluation of secure multi-party computation solutions, with a particular focus on the usability and lightweight delivery of privacy-enhancing software applications. He has over a decade of industry experience consulting both large organizations engaged in federally sponsored research programs and small start-ups focused on bringing new technologies to market.

Kevin is the Head of Business Development at Inpher. In his role, Kevin leads the Go-To-Market functions for the deployment and implementation of Inpher’s privacy-preserving data analytics software, XOR. Previously, Kevin was the Enterprise General Manager at DemystData where he led corporate strategy, product, and team development. Earlier, as Demyst’s Chief Customer Officer, Kevin built out and managed the company’s revenue development, enterprise accounts, and service team across global offices in New York, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Melbourne.

Before joining DemystData, Kevin was a Specialist at McKinsey & Company focusing on analytic solution development within healthcare and financial services organizations. Prior to McKinsey & Company, Kevin led the sales and product leadership at various financial institutions including LexisNexis and UBS. Originally from Delray Beach Florida, Kevin received his BSBA in Business Management and Economics from Bucknell University.

Mahnush is a Research Scientist on the Statistics & Privacy team at Facebook with a PhD in cryptography/computer science and has experience building secure systems in industry. She leverages her expertise in MPC to improve the core MPC libraries that are being used to rebuild Facebook’s ads systems to be more private.

Kurt Nielsen holds a PhD in Business Economics and did combined graduate studies at the University of Copenhagen, University of Toronto and UC Berkeley. He has been pioneering the use of advanced distributed cryptography as Associated Professor at University of Copenhagen and most notably as co-founder of Partisia, Sepior and Partisia Blockchain Foundation. He has worked as entrepreneur, researcher, and consultant across industries and with a special focus on strategic decision making, applied information economics, advanced cryptography, mechanism design and data science in broad terms.

Shereen is the CEO of Nth Party. She is a Boston-based entrepreneur and active angel investor. Shereen served as a Fund Manager and CEO at Launch Angels (now Alumni Venture Group,) a Boston-based seed stage VC firm, where she managed the Where Funds investments in 13 early stage companies. She co-founded BuysideFX, where she led Product. She also held a senior Product Management role at Boston-based Currensee (acquired by Oanda). Shereen was also the Executive Director of the Boston Women’s Workforce Council, which relied on the type of cryptographic technology that the Nth Party is bringing to market now.

Omer is the co-founder and VP Research of ZenGo, a consumer crypto wallet powered by MPC. Omer is an avid open-source contributor.

Smart received a BSc degree from the University of Reading in 1989 and his PhD degree from the University of Kent at Canterbury in 1992. Smart spent three years at Hewlett-Packard from 1997 to 2000. From 2000 to 2017 he was at the University of Bristol. From 2018 he has been based in the COSIC group at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven.

Smart has held a Royal Society Wolfson Merit Award, and two ERC Advanced Grant. He was Vice President of the International Association for Cryptologic Research (2014-2016). In 2016 he was named as a Fellow of the IACR.

Smart was a founder of the startup Identum, which was bought by Trend Micro in 2008. In 2013 he co-founded, Unbound Security, a company deploying products based on multi-party computations. He is also the co-founder of the Real World Cryptography conference series.

Ahmet is based out of California and joined Sepior in 2016 as the company’s first full-time CEO. Before Sepior, Ahmet was CEO of Soonr, a secure content management SaaS provider to over 150,000 businesses that was acquired by Autotask. Before Soonr, Ahmet held executive roles at SpiderCloud and Trapeze Networks, an enterprise wireless company acquired by Juniper. Ahmet was the founding CEO of SolarFlare, a fabless semiconductor company, and held management and engineering roles at PairGain Technologies, SynOptics Communications, and Electronic Data Systems.

I am a researcher at TNO, the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research. Goal of my research is to bridge the gap between academic insights in privacy enhancing technology and the need for these new techniques in industry. At TNO we research the feasibility of MPC and other techniques in many different domains, from health care to finance. Lately, I have worked together with Dutch banks on how they can securely collaborate to detect financial crime.

Frank is the chief marketing officer at Sepior and a co-founder and president of the MPC Alliance. With roots in electical engineering, he has over 25 years of security and networking experience where he has lead marketing, business development, sales, product management, product development and/or general management for Sepior, Wedge Networks, Cyan (Ciena), Calix, AT&T, and Paradyne. Frank has a passion for connecting people and emerging technologies to drive innovation.