http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/seminar/ Upcoming Seminars to be held at the Department of Statistics, The University of Auckland en-nz http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/2012/seminar/#at-2012-05-24Thursday, 24 May 2012, 4:00 pm; Assoc. Prof. Steven Galbraith, U. Auckland; Abstract: Public key cryptography is a very active research area, with many theoretical and practical challenges. One area of current theoretical interest is "lattice-based cryptography". Many of the computational problems in this area have a rather statistical flavour. In particular, I will discuss the learning with errors problem (LWE), which can be thought of as linear regression modulo a prime. LWE was introduced by Oded Regev in 2005 and has a number of cryptographic applications. The talk will be a survey of some of this work and will be accessible to a general audience. Mark Holmes2012-05-04