PolyConf

PolyConf
Name	PolyConf
Genre	Technology conference
Frequency	Annual
First	2010
Location	San Francisco, California
Organized by	Independent nonprofit collective

PolyConf is an annual technology and interdisciplinary conference that convenes researchers, engineers, activists, and artists to discuss developments in privacy, security, cryptography, distributed systems, and public policy. The conference attracts participants from major technology companies, academic institutions, civil society groups, and standards organizations, and has been noted for bridging practical engineering with legal and ethical debates. PolyConf features keynote talks, technical papers, workshops, and panels that draw on work from both industry laboratories and university research centers.

Overview

PolyConf brings together practitioners from Google, Apple Inc., Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon (company), IBM, Intel, NVIDIA, ARM Holdings, Qualcomm, Cisco Systems, Intel Research, Mozilla Corporation, Dropbox, and Twitter alongside academics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon University, Princeton University, Harvard University, University of Cambridge, Oxford University, ETH Zurich, University of Toronto, University of Washington, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, California Institute of Technology, and Yale University. The event routinely features representatives from standards bodies and advocacy organizations such as Internet Engineering Task Force, World Wide Web Consortium, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Open Crypto Audit Project, Global Privacy Assembly, and Center for Democracy & Technology. Sponsors have included ACM, IEEE, Mozilla Foundation, Linux Foundation, The Tor Project, and OpenAI.

History

PolyConf was founded in 2010 by a coalition of researchers and volunteers influenced by early gatherings like DEF CON, Black Hat (conference), HOPE (Hackers on Planet Earth), and FOSDEM. Initial program committees included participants formerly affiliated with RSA Conference, Usenix, Chaos Communication Congress, CanSecWest, and Strata Data Conference. Early years featured collaborations with university labs such as MIT Media Lab, Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research, Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and CMU Computer Science Department. Over time the conference expanded its remit to include policy dialogues referencing institutions like United Nations, European Commission, Federal Trade Commission (United States), U.S. Department of Justice, and U.K. Information Commissioner's Office. High-profile moments included debates echoing issues raised at Snowden revelations, discussions connected to rulings like Carpenter v. United States, and panels reflecting proceedings at European Court of Human Rights.

Program and Format

The program typically includes plenary keynotes, peer-reviewed short papers, long-form tutorials, hands-on workshops, lightning talks, and bird-of-a-feather sessions. Review committees have historically drawn members from ACM SIGCOMM, ACM SIGSAC, IEEE Security and Privacy, USENIX, IETF Working Group chairs, W3C Technical Architecture Group, and editorial boards of journals such as Communications of the ACM and IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. Workshops have been co-located with events like NeurIPS, ICML, CVPR, SIGGRAPH, and CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. The conference employs double-blind peer review modeled after procedures used at PLDI, OSDI, SOSP, and NSDI and publishes proceedings analogous to proceedings from ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security.

Topics and Themes

Core technical themes include applied cryptography, secure multiparty computation, differential privacy, homomorphic encryption, and zero-knowledge proofs, with frequent cross-references to deployments at companies like Apple Inc. and Google and standards efforts at IETF and W3C. Systems themes cover consensus algorithms, blockchain platforms such as Ethereum, decentralized storage like IPFS, secure enclave technologies exemplified by Intel SGX, and formal verification efforts seen at D.A.R.E. Systems. Machine learning and privacy intersections draw speakers from OpenAI, DeepMind, Google DeepMind, Facebook AI Research, OpenAI Safety, and academic labs including MIT CSAIL. Policy and societal impact discussions engage actors such as European Commission, United Nations Human Rights Council, ACLU, Human Rights Watch, International Criminal Court, and World Economic Forum.

Speakers and Community

Past speakers and participants have included notable technologists and public figures affiliated with Bruce Schneier, Whitfield Diffie, Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, Shafi Goldwasser, Silvio Micali, Tim Berners-Lee, Vint Cerf, Radia Perlman, Dan Boneh, Dawn Song, Alexei Efros, Fei-Fei Li, Ian Goodfellow, Andrew Ng, Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Emily Bender, Cynthia Dwork, Jon Kleinberg, Leslie Lamport, Barbara Liskov, David Chaum, Ralph Merkle, Moxie Marlinspike, Moxie Marlinspike, Christopher Wray, Margaret Mitchell, Timnit Gebru, Cory Doctorow, Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, and representatives from EFF and Amnesty International. Community initiatives include mentorship programs inspired by Grace Hopper Celebration and diversity efforts modeled on Lesbians Who Tech and AnitaB.org. Local chapters coordinate meetups in cities like San Francisco, New York City, London, Berlin, Paris, Toronto, Vancouver, Sydney, Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore, and Bangalore.

Impact and Reception

PolyConf has influenced engineering practice and public debate, with proposals discussed at the conference informing specifications at IETF and W3C, implementations by firms such as Mozilla Corporation and Cloudflare, and academic citations in venues like IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. Coverage has appeared in outlets including The New York Times, The Guardian, Wired, The Verge, TechCrunch, and MIT Technology Review. Critiques sometimes reference tensions similar to controversies at RSA Conference and debates that occurred around Cambridge Analytica and Cambridge Analytica scandal policy fallout; proponents point to collaborations with Open Source Initiative and standards bodies as indicators of constructive impact. The conference's archival materials have been used in university courses at Stanford University, MIT, UC Berkeley, and Carnegie Mellon University and cited in policy hearings before bodies like the United States Congress and the European Parliament.

Category:Technology conferences