Cryptocurrencies, security and privacy

Did you hear stories of someone paying for a pint of beer with bitcoins which were worth a fortune later? First appearing in 2009, cryptocurrencies are now commonplace around the world. One may expect crypto-asset owners to be highly vigilant about security of their tokens, yet they remain vulnerable to targeted attacks, scams and losses. This talk will summarise insights from research studies of crypto-asset owners and shed light on their attitudes, risk concerns, security awareness, and experienced harms. We will discuss the common security and privacy pitfalls and how to aviod them.

Did you know, that even computers don't calculate exact results? Computers have to round to fit results in memory, just like we would on paper. When adding up lots of numbers, this effect can cause different results depending on the order of summation.
Such a summation happens in machine learning, where large models must calculate with billions of parameters. Our research found that for these models this difference can become so large that it causes different predictions on different computers. In this talk I will explain why and how this happens, and how that can affect us in our daily lives.