To find the first example of knowledge-sharing in academia, you’d have to travel back in time to 1665 and grab yourself a copy of the first ever academic journal, the Journal des sçavans. The publication, aimed at intellectuals (the title translates to “journal of the learned”), featured reviews of the latest books and recent discoveries and developments within science and the arts.
As rudimentary as the initial leaflet was, it initiated a new way for society’s big thinkers to come together and share their ideas. Different disciplines soon adopted similar models, creating their own publications as a means to inform and connect their communities of experts, a mission that is very much still alive today and, thankfully, supported by more efficient media.
Open science is the norm today. Researchers publish their data and results, conduct peer reviews and share educational resources and individual efforts for the greater good. Knowledge-sharing in the academic world still faces many roadblocks, however, both internally and externally. This is especially true when it comes to highly specialized domains whose contributions are still obscure to many.
As the saying goes, there is strength in numbers. A key factor in pushing open science further lies within the community itself. In this article, we will explore the importance of building and nurturing a community, tackling challenges that arise and providing guidance to overcome them. In particular, I want to focus on a science widely adopted and yet somewhat overlooked: cryptography.
What Is Open Science?
Similar to the principles that guide open-source development, open science is an approach that champions knowledge-sharing and community-building to empower scientists to build a developmental ecosystem for a field or technology.
The Benefits of Open Science
Historically, some disciplines have benefitted from the practice of open science more than others, with medicine and technology often leading the charge. A growing number of scientific areas and specializations are following this approach, however. Cryptography falls into this category. It’s an ancient practice that has transitioned from hand-written ciphers to complex mathematical constructions that power today’s modern technologies.
Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) is one of the most innovative techniques in this field, hailed as a possible gold standard of cryptography. Realized for the first time in 2009 thanks to the work of Craig Gentry, the technology unlocks a new computation paradigm: the ability to compute encrypted data without revealing any of it. Traditionally, encrypted data is essentially inaccessible until it is decrypted. With FHE, however, you can take your encrypted data and actually do something with it, whether carrying out simple arithmetic (e.g., an encrypted calculator) or conducting a variety of more complicated things (e.g., encrypted machine learning or encrypted smart contracts on a blockchain).
In the 15 years since Gentry’s breakthrough, the field has exploded, visible in the huge increases of both the number of academic works posted on the ePrint archive and VC funding in the space. The collective work of the FHE community has led to incredible improvements in the technology, from latency improvements in FHE implementations to automated tools like compilers and automatic parameter selection tools.
Further, there’s now a lower barrier to entry in terms of the general usability of FHE libraries. Specialist hardware is also on the horizon, which is likely to be the key that unlocks fully practical FHE. A selection of companies are already working on building hardware accelerators for FHE that will, eventually, integrate existing software libraries for FHE. With hardware developers and cryptographers working together to achieve this goal, FHE has the potential to become more widespread. Craig Gentry himself recently provided an exhaustive overview of this evolution in a talk titled “Past, Present, and Future of FHE” during an FHE.org meetup.
Overcoming Obstacles to Building Community
We can see a clear correlation between the levels of interaction within the FHE community and the progress in the field. The community is rich and growing, with thousands of people joining dedicated platforms and regularly signing up for conferences and specialized events. Building the community will always entail challenges in keeping members engaged, contributing and interacting, however. Here are some examples.
Resistance to Sharing Personal Results Too Early
Openly sharing ideas in academic and professional forums can be tricky, especially with the competitive nature of publications and ideas. Researchers rightfully take pride in their own discoveries and breakthroughs, and share their results in their own time. Having a community to brainstorm or discuss potential ideas with helps collaborations form at an earlier stage. Ultimately, doing so can help speed up the process from the inception of an idea to useful results.
The same community can help give researchers a platform that amplifies their voices, raises their profiles within the community and creates networking opportunities that would be otherwise unavailable. Organizing events or talks — online meet-ups, for example — to share work with an audience of peers is also a great way to receive feedback and consequently adjust ideas and projects before taking them outside the community and to industry and businesses.
Lack of Interest From Businesses
The private and public sectors can sometimes still struggle to see how academic advancements in specific fields can benefit their activities and provide value for their target consumers. The exception is when academic accomplishments are presented to them as ready-to-market products. As such, businesses can benefit from becoming an active part of the developmental environment. By interacting with the academic community and exchanging ideas, business and academia develop a mutually beneficial relationship, which ultimately helps users and consumers of the technology.
As an example, policymakers can engage academics to make sure that regulations are technically and scientifically solid and that the people in charge of writing them have the necessary knowledge to make these truly effective. Similarly, businesses and private organizations should invest in collaboration with the academic world to provide training and learning opportunities for their staffs and vice-versa to highlight applied problems to academics. These collaborations may also include developing products, services and technologies supported by the best knowledge in the field.
Difficulty Involving Developers
Developers may also face difficulty getting started in an area where the available tools can have a steep learning curve and aren’t overly easy to use. Having an open discussion forum where people can ask questions and learn from each other is essential to building the space.
Developers are problem solvers, always eager to experiment with new technologies and push their own knowledge. Hackathons and bounty programs are really effective ways to mobilize and involve them, creating an environment for them to try the latest technologies and grow their own skills. These programs provide a space where theory becomes practice, often producing applications that take the science to a whole new level and use-cases that can become products.
How to Grow an Intellectual Community
The goal of FHE.org is to create a space for the community to enable itself and its own ideas. We support and facilitate in whatever way is possible. Some of our projects include the following:
- Organize interesting bi-weekly meet-ups of interest to the FHE community (see fhe.org/meetups) and host a casual discussion afterward to help foster new connections.
- Encourage collaboration and networking between participants through side-events, like a PhD student group, for example. Doctoral students can often feel isolated in their own institutions, where there may only be a few (or sometimes none!) other students interested in their topic.
- Provide a space for the community to discuss its ideas, ask stupid questions (no questions are stupid, but you know what I mean) and generally foster open communication on all things FHE.
- Share and collate interesting documents, videos, and a variety of other types of resources on our open-source website.
Better Community Builds a Brighter Future
Recently, the collective efforts of researchers and experts passionate about privacy and encryption has contributed to growth of the sector. Businesses and private organizations are paying more attention to privacy preserving technologies, investors are recognizing the value of integrated encryption techniques and regulators are wiser on this front when designing new policies. We’ve seen some key advancements in the technology in recent years, with an increasing number of applications for FHE in areas such as blockchain, finance and AI.
With FHE also attracting investors, private organizations and government authorities, creating guidelines designed to coordinate academic and commercial inputs and regulate outputs becomes increasingly important. Along these lines, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is considering FHE for standardization. The Homomorphic Encryption Standardization group kickstarted this process in 2017 with the goal of bringing standardized FHE to the market. The ISO process brings together global experts worldwide for regular meetings with the goal of producing a standard for FHE technologies.
In this spirit of collaboration, FHE and cryptography experts from around the world recently met in Toronto to share ideas during the third FHE.org conference, which brought together 200 researchers and cryptographers from academia, industry and governments. Attendees offered tutorials on state-of-the-art tools and and gave research presentations on the latest results in the space. This type of cross-collaboration brings together the best minds in the sector and has the potential to inspire new generations of cryptographers. Therefore, this type of event is critical to push the field forward over the coming years. The next edition of the FHE.org conference is already planned for March 2025.
The true testament of the importance of dedicated conferences such as FHE.org is in the non-stop activity of the community throughout the year. Since its inception in 2020, FHE.org has hosted more than 50 online meetups featuring some of the biggest names in cryptography and FHE, has collected a significant volume of resources, including papers, demos, tutorials and use cases. All of this is accessible and available for the benefit of the community, supporting its continued growth.
