Department of Computer Science and Technology

Security Group

Friday meetings

The Security Group meets, in addition to the Tuesday seminars, also for a weekly informal gathering

every Friday, 14:00–15:00 (NEW time!),
in room FW11 of the William Gates Building.

On 14 June 2024 we decided to move future meetings two hours earlier, from our previous 16:00–17:00 time slot to our new time of 14:00–15:00. We hope this will enable more group members with late-afternoon family responsibilities to participate.

We continue to accommodate remote participants via video conferencing. Regular participants who do not have the Zoom URL at hand can ask richard.clayton AT cl.cam.ac.uk (or any other current member of the Security Group).

Friday meeting of the Security Group in FW11

These meetings are open to the general public and are frequently also attended by colleagues from other groups, undergraduate students and others who are interested in security research.

Many Friday meetings are just informal discussions about topics of current interest. We also aim to have at least a few prepared presentations each month, either from a local group member or a visitor. We usually avoid more than two brief (5–12 minutes) presentations or one typical conference talk (20–25 min) per meeting, to leave plenty time for discussion of each.

Examples for typical Friday presentations are

  • brief progress reports about the work of a PhD student,
  • report on a Part II or MPhil project in an advanced stage,
  • summaries of interesting papers or specifications,
  • summaries of the top three presentations at a recently visited conference,
  • presentations of early versions of planned papers,
  • practice talks for upcoming conference presentations,
  • tutorials on an interesting technology or topic,
  • outlook on planned work in one of our projects,
  • introductions from industrial visitors who want to pick our brains,
  • shorter presentations by guests or guest talks when no more Tuesday Security Seminar slots are left.

Every PhD student in the group is strongly encouraged to give one or two brief presentations per term. Communicating ideas and defending them in front of a critical group is an extremely important basic skill and our Friday meetings are an excellent opportunity to train this. Part II and MPhil students supervised by a Security Group member are also encouraged to give a status report of their work after they have completed around 2/3 of their project.

To schedule one these presentations contact Markus Kuhn or one of the other list managers listed on the talks.cam page. Please email a title and whether it is a 10 or 20 minute talk at least a day in advance. Richard Clayton manages the cl-security-research mailing list, which includes all the usual attendants of our meetings.

Upcoming talks

Since October 2006, Security Group meeting talks have been announced on the talks.cam website.

Past Friday presentations