Jacek Jonczy :: About

..my person

I am a PhD student and assistant at the institute of Computer Science and applied Mathematics at the University of Berne. Before I've been studying Computer Science and Mathematics at the University of Fribourg, where I got my Master degree. Since January 2005 I am a member of the RUN (reasoning under uncertainty) group.

..cryptography

Cryptography comes from the Greek words for "hidden writing". It has a long and colorful history going back thousands of years. There is a distinction between codes and ciphers. A cipher is a character-for-character or bit-for-bit transformation, whereas a code replaces one word with another word or symbol. Ciphers are thus independant of the linguistic structure of the message. Codes are not used any more, altough they had some impact during history (e.g. Navajo-Code of the U.S. army during World War II). Cryptography, known as the art of devising ciphers, and cryptanalysis, the art of breaking them, form together the science called cryptology.

..credential networks

Credential networks provide a new concept for distributed authenticity and trust management in open networks. In this approach, all network users have the possibility to issue various types of statements, so-called credentials, about other users. The general character of the underlying formal model allows to express other exisiting models, like the well known PGP web of trust, Maurer's PKI model, and other. To learn more about credential networks, please visit the corresponding references on the website of the RUN group.

..reasoning under uncertainty

The world we live in is full of uncertainty. People all over the world are every day confronted with complex decisions, often having significant consequences (medical diagnostics, stock market, etc.). Reasoning under uncertainty describes a research area which aims at the development of intelligent systems that support the process of decision making. A decision about some issue or hypothesis is related to given, but often uncertain information. And this is exactly what we do every day, namely to "reason" under uncertainty. An important issue in this context is to find appropriate methods to represent such information under an efficient form.