Nikolas Melissaris

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Hey. How are you doing? I'm Nikolas. I come from Papagou, a small suburb outside of Athens, Greece. Nice of you to stop by. I like mathematics, especially the kind that can be applied to computer science. I'm a PhD student at the crypto group at Aarhus University where I'm lucky to be advised by Claudio Orlandi and Peter Scholl. I'm fascinated by all science but my main research interests lie in the areas of theory of computation, cryptography, combinatorics, and privacy preserving techniques in machine learning.

In the past, I graduated with a BSc and MSc in Mathematics from the School of Applied Mathematical and Physical Sciences at the National Technical University of Athens, and got my MSc in Information Technology from the Rutgers Business School. At Rutgers I was fortunate to be advised by Periklis Papakonstantinou and Jaideep Vaidya. In between my degrees I taught several courses at various CUNY schools.

I've worked at Icehole Games, the Computer Security Lab at UCSB, Columbia University, MadHive, Capital Fund Management, and JP Morgan. I've taught about discrete mathematics, computer applications, databases, and web programming,

I live in the wonderful city of Aarhus, Denmark.

It is my hope that one day we'll create the technology to be able to vote on important governamental decisions from the comfort of our home, bringing society one step closer to true, direct democracy. I love science, adventures, and satire. I dislike intolerance, ignorance, and authoritarianism.

I try to be an adequate basketball player 🏀, punk rock listener 🤘, and stay away from skateboard related injuries ☠️.

My better half, Kelsey, also does cryptography. Usually, the post quantum type.

News:

• [June '24] - Our paper "Structured-Seed Pseudorandom Generators and their Applications" is now available online ➡️ [link]
• [May '24] - Super excited about our paper "Cheater Identification on a Budget" [link] being accepted by CRYPTO 2024 🎉

(Archived) News:

• [May '24] - I'll go over the basics of MPC and talk about the notion of identifiable abort including our work "Cheater Identification on a Budget" [link] at IRIF's Algorithms and Complexity seminar.
• [March '24] - I'll talk about our work "Cheater Identification on a Budget: MPC with Identifiable Abort from Pairwise MACs" [link] at this year's TPMPC. Come say hi!
• [January '24] - I'll spend the Spring '24 semester at IRIF in Paris hosted by Geoffroy Couteau. 🥐🥖🍷. Je suis désolé, je ne parle pas français.
• [October '23] - Our paper Threshold-Optimal MPC with Friends and Foes was accepted to Indocrypt '23 🎉
• [October '23] - Our paper "Cheater Identification on a Budget: MPC with Identifiable Abort from Pairwise MACs" is now available online ➡️ [link]
• [April '23] - I'll spend this summer working with the JP Morgan crypto group.
• [November '22] - I'll talk about our work "Threshold-Optimal MPC with Friends and Foes"[link] at the JP Morgan Crypto group seminar.
• [November '22] - Our paper "Threshold-Optimal MPC with Friends and Foes" is now available online ➡️ [link]
• [June '21] - I got accepted at the Aarhus crypto group as a PhD fellow!
• [May '21] - I was very lucky to get a research internship with CFM for this summer. I'm very excited to work with the brilliant people there.
• [May '21] - I got my MSc from Rutgers! My thesis "On the concrete security of practical cryptographic constructions" is available online [pdf].
• [August '19] - Our paper "Straggling for Covert Message Passing on Complete Graphs" will appear at the 57th Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing. [pdf]
• [May '19] - I'll be joining MadHive Inc. this summer for some exciting research on blockchain technologies.