FERI

Between September 17th and October 5th, our institute has organized the second consecutive holiday school on the topic of Blockchain technology, called »Blockchain, dApps & smart contracts«.

The autumn school was carried out under the sponsorship of the ECTA initiative and in cooperation with the Jožef Stefan Institute and Create Responsible.

At the institute of informatics, we are regularly trying to offer students additional knowledge in the form of holiday schools.

During a three-day workshops, students were introduced into the basics of Blockchain technology, smart contracts, the Ethereum platform, Solidity programming language, decentralized applications (dApps) and the use of oracles as part of smart contracts.

The students were divided into groups of two after the workshop and faced with a concrete challenge that organizers had prepared for them. In two and a half weeks and under the mentorship of the Blockchain Lab:UM team, the students prepared very advanced prototype solutions. The teams thus fought with their prototypes for the prize provided by the ECTA initiative, which was € 1,000.00 and 50,000 of ECTA tokens.

On Friday, the 12th October 2018, a public presentation of final prototypes and a ceremonial announcement of results took place at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. After the speech of the head of the Institute prof. dr. Marjan Heričko and Head of Blockchain Lab:UM, assis. prof. dr. Muhamed Turkanović, as well as representatives of the ECTA initiative, followed the presentation of the finalists' prototypes.

After the presentation, a four-member committee, consisting of organizers and sponsors, met behind closed doors and chose a winning group. After a difficult decision the commission chose the winners of the second blockchain holiday school, which are Vid Keršič and Primož Štukelj, both students of the 2nd year at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. They won the main prize of € 700.00 and 25,000 ECTA tokens. Second-placed students, Jaša Kšela and Jože Fartek, earned a prize of € 300.00 and 25,000 ECTA tokens for their excellent prototype solution.

Within the framework of the Call for Strategic Partnerships in Higher Education from the Erasmus+ program (KA203), it addresses the modernization of syllabi mainly from the field of embedded systems in study programs in control engineering on European level with modern contents and pedagogical approaches. Seven universities from France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Romania and Slovenia, as well as the European University Foundation from Luxembourg, are participating in the project.

Prof. dr. Marjan Mernik received an invitation to the board that he accepted with pleasure. Among the other successes that contributed to the invitation was certainly also the fact that in 2017 he was named Clarivate Analytics high-ranking researcher as the only one from Slovenia in the field of computer science and informatics.

Prof. dr. Marjan Mernik: "Being in The Honorary Advisory Board of USERN is certainly a great honor for me, for the institute and faculty. Cooperation and membership will make it easier for me to get in touch with the best researchers around the world, although I already work with researchers from Europe, America, Asia, Australia and Africa."

Congratulations!

The autumn school is supported by ECTA initiative and organized in cooperation with Jozef Stefan Institute and ‘Create Responsible’ campaign of Ministry of Economic Development and Technology, Republic of Slovenia.

Submissions will be open until Wednesday, September 12, 23:59. Due to a limited number of participants the organizer reserves the rights to choose the candidates. The final list of participants will be announced till the September 14.

Our goal is to bring actual knowledge to students, who are willing to practically expand their skills regarding the development of smart contracts and decentralized applications on the blockchain. Therefore, we organize a three-day autumn school which will focus on the blockchain basics, smart contracts, Ethereum platform, Solidity programming language, decentralized applications, web3.js, the usage of Oracle and the Truffle tool.

The selected candidates will be grouped into teams of three or four members. After introductory presentations and lectures, teams will compete in the design and development of a prototype solution based on the challenge provided by ECTA. The final presentation of prototype solutions is scheduled between October 8 and October 12, 2018. The best team(s) will receive a cash reward. Award fund is 1,000.00 EUR and 50,000 ECTA Pay Tokens.

Dear researcher, if you are working in applications of new techniques and methods enabling collaborative work and efficient service engineering (related domains are also welcome), you might consider, as well encourage your colleagues, to submit a paper to this year Collaboration, software & services conference, which will be held in Ljubljana, Slovenia in October. Paper submission deadline is 4th of September 2018.

More information at: http://css.informatika.uni-mb.si/2018/eng/

From August 27 to August 31, 2018 the following workshops will be held:

• Programming for girls,
• Create a candy scheduler,
• Let's develop our first computer game,
• My first Android game.

This year about 60 participants are coming to the Summer School of Computer Science. We look forward to bringing them a wonderful world of computing and information technology in an interesting way, acquainting them with the basics of programming and possibly their future professions. We are glad that many girls have applied. In the world, more and more girls decide on this profession. Why would not be that case with us?

This year's summer school of computer science was financially supported by donors: Inova d.o.o., Igea d.o.o., and Comtrade d.o.o.

Three competitions dedicated to students of all levels (bachelor, master and PhD) are organized : the applied research, the embedded security challenge and the capture the flag. While qualifications are held online, the finals will be held from 8 to 10 November 2018. Finalists for the three competitions are granted (to cover hotel and travel cost) to come in France for on-site competitions. Awards will be given for 1st, 2nd and 3rd place (respectively 700, 500 and 300 euros). During the vent, a career fair with cyber security companies will be organized. Also keynotes will be given by security experts. Finally, a free social event will be held on Friday night.

You can find hereafter more details about the competitions:

• The Embedded Systems Challenge (ESC) 2018 competition considers the expansion of the threat landscape caused by IoT devices, and invites contestants to develop covert attacks that (mis)use IoT devices - smart bulbs in particular - to exfiltrate data through side-channels from air-gapped networks. The ESC18 competition is divided into two phases:
  1. A preliminary qualification phase , where teams must compile and submit a written report characterizing possible side-channel attacks that (mis)use IoT devices, such as smart light bulbs , to stealthily exfiltrate secret information.
  2. A final phase , where qualified teams are invited to the CSAW event of their region to present a live demonstration of their implementations on smart light bulbs provided by the organizers. The technical requirements and details of each phase are elaborated in: https://github.com/momalab/csaw_esc_2018
• In the Applied Research Competition ( https://csaw.io/research ), students are invited to run for the CSAW Best Paper Award. Eligible submissions include any paper published between September 1, 2017 and August 31, 2018, on any topic related to the application or implementation of security technologies or security systems. You can register for this Competition at https://easychair.org/cfp/CSAW18 . The submission deadline is 11:59 CET September 9, 2018. Registration is open to anyone matching our target profile, so feel free to forward this mail to your colleagues.
• For the Capture the Flag , registrations are open until Sept 14 on the following website: https://csaw.engineering.nyu.edu/ctf preliminary rounds start Sep. 14 and ends Sep. 16.

IWSSIP is an international conference on theoretical, experimental and applied signal processing. IWSSIP brings together researchers and developers from both academia and industry to report on the latest scientific and theoretical advances, to discuss major issues and to demonstrate state-of-the-art systems. IWSSIP 2018 will follow the successful events previously held in Budapest, Manchester, Poznan, Zagreb, Bratislava, Maribor, Bucharest, Prague, Chalkida, Rio de Janeiro, Sarajevo, Vienna, Dubrovnik, and London. As in the previous years, all accepted papers will be submitted to IEEEXplore.

The international program committee is represented by 30 members, among which some are also IEEE Fellow. General chair of the organizing commitee is assoc. prof. dr. Peter Planinšič. The program of the conference is composed of 3 keynote speeches, 3 tutorials, 3 special sessions, and 68 scientific papers. Authors of the contributions come from Algeria, Austria, Brazil, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, China, Croatia, Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Japan, Lebanon, Macedonia, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Korea, Thailand, and Turkey.

More info: http://iwssip2018.org/

Who can participate?

• Students and young professionals that fulfil the following criteria:
  • Age from 16 to 28 years
  • Interest in energy issues
  • English language skills (English is the working language)
• The number of participants is limited to 25 persons as well as to a maximum of two persons per region.

The tour is free of charge!

How to become an accredited participant?

• Please apply to tino.blondiau@enu.at as soon as possible with CV and letter of motivation
• Received applications will be ranked by submission, so be quick to ensure a participation

For further information please visit our Website:

https://www.enu.at/energy-future-tour