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SUMMARY:The SAFE Network from First Principles - Erick Lavoie (McGill Univ
 ersity)
DTSTART:20150410T100000Z
DTEND:20150410T110000Z
UID:TALK58845@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Eiko Yoneki
DESCRIPTION:The SAFE network is an upcoming fully peer-to-peer platform th
 at combines a peer-to-peer system\, modern cryptography\, and a crypto-cur
 rency to create an autonomous and self-managing network to securely store 
 data in a way that will empower users by preserving their privacy. In "The
  SAFE Network from First Principles" series of lectures\, the core ideas a
 nd algorithms of the system are progressively introduced in a way that sho
 uld be accessible to a general public without a Computer Science backgroun
 d. This presentation focuses on efficiency and scalability issues behind t
 he system and introduces the notions of Identifier Space\, Closeness\, XOR
 -Distance\, K-Buckets (as pioneered by Kademlia)\, and it ends with a comp
 arison between the BitTorrent Distributed Hash Table and the SAFE Routing 
 layer to show how the same ideas can be used for achieving different purpo
 ses in peer-to-peer systems.\n\nThe SAFE network is built by MaidSafe\, a 
 Scottish start-up based in Troon that spent the last 8 years going through
  multiple iterations of the plateform to find a financially sustainable wa
 y of building it as a business without compromising the vision of releasin
 g it as a common good. They raised several millions of dollars in Bitcoins
  in April 2014 to fund the last stretch of development before the first be
 ta release\, through a community pre-sale of their internal crypto-currenc
 y that will be used to buy services from the network once it goes live.\n\
 n\nBio: Erick Lavoie (http://ericklavoie.com) is a PhD student from McGill
  University. His PhD project consists in building a peer-to-peer computing
  infrastructure using web technologies for numerical computing that scient
 ists using numerical languages\, such as MATLAB\, can transparently levera
 ge. His is an active community member of the MaidSafe forums and has been 
 touring Europe since January 20th in order to extract\, validate\, and imp
 rove the core academic contributions behind the SAFE network design\, have
  them critically reviewed by the leading members of the research community
 \, and adapt them to his own project.\n
LOCATION:FW26\, Computer Laboratory\, William Gates Builiding
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