Secure Cloud Storage and Best Senior Project

This talk has two parts: 1) As many services are moving to the cloud, we are losing control of our own data. This constitutes one of the biggest problems that we face in this decade. I will briefly present the problems and current solutions to secure cloud storage, highlighting techniques to know to understand and improve current solutions, as well as open problems. 2) I will talk about my journey to the Bilkent CS Best Senior Project award, and entrepreneurship, discussing my past and current roles.

Alptekin Kupcu

Alptekin Kupcu received his B.S. from Bilkent University in 2004, and Ph.D. from Brown University in 2010. Since then, he has been working as a faculty at Koc University, and leading the Cryptography, Security & Privacy Research Group he founded. His research mainly focuses on applied cryptography, with applications to cloud security, privacy-preserving machine learning, peer-to-peer networks, blockchains, and game theory and mechanism design. He has also led the development of the Cashlib cryptographic library, which is available as open source online. Dr. Kupcu has various accomplishments including 6 international patents granted, 11 funded research projects (for 9 of which he was the principal investigator), 2 European Union COST Action management committee memberships, 4 Teaching Awards, 2 Outstanding Young Scientist Awards (BAGEP and GEBIP), METU Parlar Foundation Research Encouragement Award, ACM and IEEE Senior Member Awards, and the Royal Society of UK Newton Advanced Fellowship. He is a co-founder of 2 startups: Xtinge Technology Inc. and FineSci Technology Inc. For more information, simply search for his name online.