Anna's statement for elections to the IACR Board

There are, of course, a myriad issues that the IACR is facing moving forward, from online publishing to dealing with visa restrictions. I promise to deal with these issues with care and an open mind. However, in this statement I would like to share my ideas on how to make our conferences, as gateways to the field of cryptography, more accessible to newcomers, be it students, researchers from other fields, or practitioners.

Why is it important to be more accessible to newcomers? There are many more or less obvious reasons, and here I list some of them:

• It's the right thing to do to be nice and welcoming to new people.
• Continued excellence in research. Without new researchers, we might just run out of steam. If we don't welcome them, they will go somewhere else.
• Impact from other fields. Progress in cryptography may come from unexpected directions, and people with a different perspective will help us discover them.
• Impact on other fields. If researchers and practitioners in related fields (for example, computer security) do not understand our brilliant results, they will not use them.
• Funding. Most research programs, both academic and industrial, depend on outside decision makers for funding. Establishing broad-based understanding of cryptography among various research communities will positively influence people who make funding decisions.

Of course, we are already doing a good job; but I think that we may do even better without all that much extra work. Here are some example ideas that I would like to see discussed:

• Tutorials. Our conferences are great opportunities to get a sense of what is going on in the field outside of one's own particular area of expertise. However, often one needs to already know a lot about a particular research area to even understand the statement of a result and its significance. I think that tutorials that would take place the day before the contributed talks begin may help a great deal in putting contributed talks in broader context. Not only will they help new people understand the rest of the conference, but they will also make sure that cryptographers working on different problems remain aware of each others' work.
• Mentoring. At a conference, the opportunity to interact with fellow researchers is at least as important as the opportunity to hear scheduled talks. However, newcomers to our field (particularly students) may be at a disadvantage: how do you get up the courage to approach an expert you do not know with a possibly stupid question? One idea that might work is to have more experienced attendees volunteer to mentor less experienced ones. Mentors would be to help their mentees feel welcome and help them get more out of the conference.
• Special issues of journals. In many other research communities, following a good conference there is a special issue of a journal for publishing full versions of (some of) its papers. Full versions of papers do a better job explaining the results, benefiting from the questions and discussions that the papers generated at the conferences. Therefore, full versions are more accessible than proceedings versions. It would be nice to have that for IACR conferences as well. Having such special issues would make sure that full versions of papers actually do get written (personally, I am much more likely to get something done when there is a set deadline), mistakes in proceedings versions are corrected, and cryptography researchers get the recognition that comes with having journal publications.