Membership meeting - Crypto 2019
Wednesday August 22, 2019

(Supporting slides are available on the IACR website.)

President Christian Cachin opened the meeting at 16h47, giving a brief overview
of the IACR, its conference/workshops, etc. He reminded the membership that 
three of the directors and all four officers have terms expiring this year, 
and encourages members to run for office.

The President explains that the annual IACR Distinguished Lecture is awarded
by the IACR to people who have made important contributions to cryptology 
research. The lecture alternates from Eurocrypt to Crypto to Asiacrypt.
The IACR Distinguished Lecture for 2020 (Crypto) is awarded to Silvio Micali.

The President recalls the call for nominations for IACR Fellows: outstanding 
IACR members, recognized for technical and professional contributions.
Nominations are due by 15 November 2019.

Test-of-time award, this award is given yearly for each one of the three 
IACR General Conferences (Eurocrypt, Crypto, and Asiacrypt) for a paper with 
a lasting impact on the field. The selected 3 papers for 2019 are:

* Fuzzy Extractors: How to Generate Strong Keys from Biometrics and Other Noisy 
  Data
  - Yevgeniy Dodis, Leonid Reyzin, Adam D. Smith
  - Eurocrypt 2004
*  Multicollisions in Iterated Hash Functions. Application to Cascaded 
   Constructions
  - Antoine Joux
  - Crypto 2004
* How Far Can We Go Beyond Linear Cryptanalysis?
  - Thomas Baigneres, Pascal Junod, Serge Vaudenay
  - Asiacrypt 2004

Treasurer Brian LaMacchia gave a report summarizing the IACR's finances. 
He highlighted the fact that the IACR has a robust financial position. 
The Treasurer shows an inflation-adjusted figure for the three General 
Conference registration fees. This highlights that the current registration 
fees have remained quite stable. The treasurer recommends to not change the
current IACR membership fee. Cachin thanks LaMacchia for his continued 
hard work. 

McCurley thanks LaMacchia for his effort to move to Strip and reducing our fees.

Membership Secretary Douglas Stebila gave a report and showed that membership 
has increased significantly in 2019 to a record number of 2326 due to the 
incorporation of Real World Crypto.
Cachin thanked Stebila for his continued hard work.

For the online services, the Communications Secretary Mike Rosulek has
stepped down after doing this from 2014-2019. The President thanks Mike
for all his work.  The new Communications Secretary is Foteini Baldimtsi
and the President thanks her for taking up this role.  Thanks to Kevin
McCurley and Kay McKelly the redesign of the IACR website is finished with
a much more mobile friendly look and feel.

The current topics discussed in the Board are related to the affiliated
workshops, the worry about growing difficulties with visas and the
elections.  Another topic is the switch to parallel co-chairs from the
current rolling co-chair for the general conferences. The Board has decided
to start this with the 2020 or 2021 conferences.

The Presidents recalls the discussion if we should rethink the schedule for
the General Conferences. Traditionally the conferences run from Sunday
evening to Thursday lunch-time with possibly a free afternoon. Currently,
the affiliated events are hosted mainly before the main event in the
weekend. What about running the main conference from Tuesday to Thursday
for 3 full days such that we have one day before and after for affiliated
events?

The President opens the floor for discussion.  Ferguson wonders that by
going multi-track and losing the free Tuesday afternoon things get very
packed. One can only absorb that much information per day. Why not extend
the conference with one day?  The President explains that the number of
papers also have an impact on this.  However, this should definitely be
discussed and is something for the PC to think about.  Yung mentions that
moving to 3 days for EC2021 is maybe too restrictive.  Need flexibility for
the affiliated events.  McCurley states that our field has grown by moving
to parallel tracks and wonders if moving to 3 tracks is an option. Also
more people at fewer events might be something to consider. The President
agrees that we need to think how to organize ourselves in the future. It
would be good if we could all come together (1000 versus 600 participants).

The meeting was closed at 17h55.