Yesterday

1. CmpE talk: Prof. Onur Mutlu ETH Zurich
   • Start time: 01:30pm, Monday, March 25th
   • End time: 02:30pm, Monday, March 25th
   • Where: AVS Conference Room, BM

   • Title:
     Using Commodity Memory Devices to Support Fundamental Security Primitives

     Abstract:
     Modern commodity DRAM devices expose a promising tradeoff between
     latency and reliability. In this talk, we describe how this tradeoff
     can be exploited to enable these devices to generate true random
     numbers (TRNs) and evaluate physically uncloneable functions
     (PUFs). We show that the errors that occur when memory access latency
     is reduced can be used as a "true" entropy source for reliably
     generating TRNs and evaluating PUFs, with both low latency and high
     throughput. Our techniques do not require modifications to the DRAM
     device itself. We validate the reliability of the techniques via
     rigorous experimental characterization of more than 200
     state-of-the-art LPDDR4 DRAM chips.

     Bio:
     Onur Mutlu is a Professor of Computer Science at ETH Zurich. He is
     also a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University, where he
     previously held the Strecker Early Career Professorship. His current
     broader research interests are in computer architecture, systems,
     hardware security, and bioinformatics. A variety of techniques he,
     along with his group and collaborators, has invented over the years
     have influenced industry and have been employed in commercial
     microprocessors and memory/storage systems. He obtained his PhD and MS
     in ECE from the University of Texas at Austin and BS degrees in
     Computer Engineering and Psychology from the University of Michigan,
     Ann Arbor. He started the Computer Architecture Group at Microsoft
     Research (2006-2009), and held various product and research positions
     at Intel Corporation, Advanced Micro Devices, VMware, and Google. He
     received the inaugural IEEE Computer Society Young Computer Architect
     Award, the inaugural Intel Early Career Faculty Award, US National
     Science Foundation CAREER Award, Carnegie Mellon University Ladd
     Research Award, faculty partnership awards from various companies, and
     a healthy number of best paper or "Top Pick" paper recognitions at
     various computer systems, architecture, and hardware security
     venues. He is an ACM Fellow "for contributions to computer
     architecture research, especially in memory systems", IEEE Fellow for
     "contributions to computer architecture research and practice", and an
     elected member of the Academy of Europe (Academia Europaea). His
     computer architecture and digital circuit design course lectures and
     materials are freely available on YouTube, and his research group
     makes a wide variety of software and hardware artifacts freely
     available online. For more information, please see his webpage at
     https://people.inf.ethz.ch/omutlu/.

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Today

1. CmpE Seminar: Electronic Contracts Concluded via Bots by Selin Çetin
   • Start time: 12:00pm, Tuesday, March 26th
   • End time: 01:00pm, Tuesday, March 26th
   • Where: AVS Conference Room, BM

   • Abstract:
     The increasing usage of technology brings along many questions that need to be answered in a legal manner. "Online transactions of bots" is one of these. Especially, their use in concluding electronic contracts is a controversial issue in the doctrinal sense. Electronic contracts can be concluded by methods like web sites, e-mail, mobile applications. The fac, that bots are included in these methods creates uncertainties in terms of contracts law such as: who are the parties to the contract, whether the contracts concluded are between the bots and available people, whether the declarations submitted are "offers" or "calls for offers", and the binding of the declarations.

     On the other hand, some legal problems caused by increasing usage of electronic contracts concluded by the bots can be solved by existing legal rules. Referring to the regulations in Turkey, the Law on the Regulation of Electronic Commerce, the Law on Consumer Protection and the Directive on Distance Contracts can be taken into consideration in this respect. However, there are technological developments for which the existing regulations are inadequate. It is possible that the bots which can quickly trade online can cause consumers to be victimized especially when they attain discounted products. Within the framework of European Union (EU) regulations that have a profound effect on Turkish Law and of the Turkish Law itself, the usage of bots in electronic contracts is only reached through an extensive interpretation method. Therefore, it is likely that there will be a legislative work on the use of bots in the future. Since it is a developing technology, it may be necessary to refer to models such as soft law, co-regulation, and self-regulation rather than hard law regulation in this field. Considering the approaches within the scope of the EU, it will be necessary to regulate bots, especially for the protection of consumers, in the following periods. Therefore, the legislators in Turkey can follow a road map in parallel with them.

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