Previous Year's Keynote Talks (ACSS-2024)

Dr. Maikel Lazaro PEREZ GORT

Ca' Foscari University, Venice, Italy



Opportunities and challenges of information hiding techniques for Earth Observation data protection.

Earth observation (EO) data providers often set up different conditions for accessing their content on the Internet. They are the starting point of raw materials for many research projects based on remote sensing and geographic information systems. Monitoring the authenticity and origins of EO data is paramount but also difficult, considering they can be copied and disseminated quickly after being tampered with. Often, the data is spread and exploited before detecting any anomaly or without detecting them at all. In this talk, we address the possibilities for implementing information-hiding techniques in EO data, such as watermarking for provenance identification and authenticity validation, among other applications. Our proposal can be used by any content featuring a multilevel representation of information stored in multi-dimensional structures.

Dr. Sourav Chakraborty

Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, India



Testing correctness of samplers using property testing: from theory to practice and back again

How can one test the correctness of a program that is supposed to output an element from a large universe according to a certain distribution? These kinds of programs are heavily used in real life but are rarely tested for correctness. This problem can be framed as a problem in property testing. Property testing is a subject that deals with these challenges. It tries to design sub-linear algorithms for testing various properties of inputs. The key lies in the way the data is accessed by the algorithm. One of the central problems in property testing and many other related subjects is testing if a distribution has a certain property - say whether a distribution on a finite set is uniform. The conventional way of accessing the distributions is by drawing samples according to the distributions. Unfortunately, in this setting the number of samples that are necessary for testing properties of distribution (for most natural properties) is polynomial in the size of support of the distribution. Thus when the support is relatively big the algorithms become impractical in real life applications. We introduced a new way of accessing the distribution using ``conditional-sampling oracle". This oracle can be used to design much faster algorithms for testing properties of distribution and thus makes the algorithm useful in practical scenarios. We show that the conditional oracle can be implemented in many real life problems and we have been able to show the usefulness of this model and our algorithms in practical purposes and in other areas of research - like testing of probabilistic verification. This model also throws a number of interesting theoretical questions.

Mr. Sumit Misra

RS Software, kolkata, India



Key considerations for building exa-scale payment systems

Digital payment adoption across the globe and especially in India is rapid. UPI, for example, is clocking 14+ billion transaction in month of May 2024, which grew by 7.7% from April 2024. Systems that enable such payment volumes and growing need special attention to multiple design aspects. The dependency of nations is increasingly growing in such systems. Today 30+ crores people and 5+ crores merchant is dependent on UPI and constitutes 80% of retail digital payment in India. This session covers the key design considerations to maintain high-availability, high-reliability, and low-latency, while supporting high-scalability.