 Homomorphic encryption is a type of privacy technology. Privacy technologies allow organizations, individuals, companies, governments to share sensitive data without the fear of leaking any sensitive information and allows organizations to, and homomorphic encryption as a specific type of privacy technology, allows organizations to take data, encrypt it in a very secure way, send the data encrypted to third parties who can then run analysis on the data all well decrypted without sharing any kind of decryption keys or anything like that. A really nice feature of homomorphic encryption besides this malleability of sharing and things like that is that it's known to be post-quantum. What this means is that it's very secure and resistant to these emerging quantum computing attacks. It's related multi-party computation is another kind of privacy technology One of the nice things about homomorphic encryption is that it allows quite a number of use cases for interaction. So for example it allows, for example I could take data, encrypt it, upload it to a cloud environment, a quantum computing environment, and then run computations on that data It also allows the ability to mix and match for example multiple participants to encrypt their data and share data one-on-one and run joint distributed computations It also allows organizations to each encrypt their data locally aggregate that data at a certain point, say a cloud computing environment and then run computations and so forth And so a nice feature of homomorphic encryption as compared to secure multi-party computation that you mentioned is the ability to basically mix and match where the computation is done and allow the ability to allow the ability for participants to contribute data and then go offline and allow delegated access to information I very firmly believe that the need for privacy technologies is driven for the need for collaboration An important part of collaboration is trust and transparency and interoperability to formulate trust and transparency is through the use of open source technologies to allow very sensitive technologies that allow computations on very sensitive data is to adopt the use of open source implementations of these technologies so that it can be inspected, evaluated, and approved The other side of it of course is how standardization can take up these various technologies to allow not just interoperability but the transparency helps propagate the ability to adopt these technologies as a standard security so that non-experts can trust the ability of these technologies A line I like to use about homomorphic encryption and standardization and open source are rising tide floats all boats By being able to collaborate with sensitive data and collaborate on standardized sensitive data we all benefit as a society globally and across the world Oh very much so When duality is working with our commercial partners we're often asked about what are the emerging standards being used for this Standards help commerce, help commercialization the adoption of these technologies Open source in particular is really the close cousin or near peer of standardization and that allows people to know what they're getting without having to rely on any kind of black box proprietary technology which I think is critical for the adoption of community standards Very much so Promote collaboration across jurisdictions across geographies Example that I like to provide is that medical emergencies no-no boundaries You see that with the recent COVID-19 pandemic we see it with cancer we see it with any kinds of medical affliction and particularly look at rare disease or rare cancers Anyone hospital might see one specific rare disease once every 10 years but if you look over globally for example rare disease might strike hundreds of thousands of people per year but just spread over the entire globe It would be tremendous for humanity if we combine data globally across geographies and develop better treatments for these rare diseases because the unfortunate reality of rare disease is that anyone rare disease affects many people across the world and there are many such rare diseases and a significant percentage of the population is affected by rare disease on a regular basis This challenge of financial crime is quite pressing nowadays We estimated that financial crime reduces the abilities of government to collect tax revenue to help promote social benefits for their citizens and it basically promotes lawlessness and general other crimes also One of the challenges of financial crime is that it also knows no boundaries that there is a constant exfiltration of finances and the country is the next as part of tax evasion and things like that as part of drug running and terroristic type activities of course countries rightfully want to protect the privacy rights of their citizens it's hard and fast rule but at the same time they want to for social good reduce financial crime for all the things and all its kind of in what it is Privacy technologies such as homomorphic encryption allow governments and allow investigators and allow law enforcement to share insights, share data, access data in a privacy protected manner such that citizens rights are protected but enables law enforcement to better fight financial crime across geographies So we started from several of the open source library providers getting together and trying to brainstorm about how to make these libraries easy to adopt not necessarily easy to use in a technical sense but easy to adopt from a trust and accessibility standpoint. One thing that we realized very early on and early participants include the team that was developing Pal say that I was part of the HE Lib team from IBM and the SEAL team from Microsoft and what we realized very early on is that one of the easiest ways to promote adoption of the technology is to develop international standards. Of course I say easy, nothing is easy but international standards but we thought it was worth an investment of our time to try to build a consortium of homomorphic encryption and enthusiast users, providers to show that there was benefits in adopting these technologies and enhance benefits in standardizing these technologies and so we created an informal industry consortium called homomorphic encryption.org both to promote these technologies, to promote standardization of these technologies we've been very fortunate to have participation from prestigious organizations such as ITU NIST and several other both national and international standards bodies to help guide us and help us with the broader adoption of and formulation of international standards for these privacy technologies in particular homomorphic encryption. There are several great ways to get your foot in the door and there are several great ways to actually get really involved we do have an organization website homomorphic encryption.org down there we have our draft standards list of participants links to various mailing lists and information about meetings that we actually host. A major part of what we do is done through various working groups that we have formed and are continuing to propagate in this consortium we have working groups associated with the security standards working groups associated with parameter selection we're going to be starting with working groups associated with hardware interactions and so forth. So the best way to reach out far and away is to join our mailing list reach out to some of the current members and we're a very open organization always very very happy and excited to have new members that want to be energized and engage with us.