Why publish at a peer-reviewed conference? Interview with Christian Matt and Daniel Tschudi

Published in

Concordium

5 min readSep 3, 2020

As the cryptography community is growing, conference publication becomes more and more competitive, the paper quality is increasing, and the acceptance ratio is decreasing, so how do you get your paper to be accepted? and why publish at a peer-reviewed conference?

To understand a little better the approach to publish at a conference and the peer-review process, we talked with Christian Matt and Daniel Tschudi, about their personal experience in this process.

Your paper “Afgjort: A Partially Synchronous Finality Layer for Blockchains” was accepted at SCN. Why publish at a conference? Why not just upload the code to Github?

Anyone can upload some code to Github and claim that it implements a secure finality layer, for example. In contrast, when publishing at conferences your submission must undergo peer-review, a process where the correctness and novelty of your results are evaluated.

How does this peer-review process work?

Each submission is assigned to 2–3 anonymous reviewers. They then independently read the paper and write a review. The reviews are normally accompanied by a recommendation on whether the submission should be accepted or not. The acceptance rate at the top cryptography conferences is usually between 20 and 40 percent.

Who are these reviewers and why are they anonymous?

The reviewers are members of the research community. Often, Ph.D. students act as subreviewers helping their advisor with reviews. The anonymity of reviewers ensures that reviewers can provide honest feedback without the fear of retaliation.

Often, the submissions themselves are anonymous as well. This ensures that all submissions are treated equally independent of who wrote them.

Can anyone publish a paper at such a conference?

Yes, there is no formal requirement such as being at a university. However, without the necessary expertise, it can be challenging to get a paper accepted.

How long does it take to publish a paper?

That can vary quite a bit. Writing a paper can take from weeks to months. Once the paper is submitted to a conference, it normally takes 1–3 months until one knows if the paper is accepted. Often, papers get rejected when they are first submitted, so they need to be revised and submitted again to another conference.

Why do you publish at conferences and not in journals?

In many fields such as biology, journal publications have higher prestige than conference publications. However, in cryptography, it is customary to publish at conferences.

By the way, there is a similar issue with the order of authors on a publication. In some fields, such as biology, the order of authors encodes the amount of their contributions. In cryptography, where it can be more difficult to estimate the individual contributions, authors are almost always ordered alphabetically according to the last name. (Daniel: Which is somewhat unfortunate 🙂 ).

Afgjort Finality Layer at SCN 2020.

The 12th International Conference on Security and Cryptography for Networks (SCN) takes place September 14–16, 2020. Researchers from around the world are presenting 33 papers there. One of these papers is titled Afgjort: A Partially Synchronous Finality Layer for Blockchains and was authored by a team of researchers from the Concordium Blockchain Research Center Aarhus (COBRA) and Concordium. Two of the authors are Christian Matt and Daniel Tschudi.

Can you tell us what the paper is about?

In this paper, we introduce the concept of finality layers for blockchains and describe Concordium’s finality layer, which we call Afgjort. We further provide a mathematical proof of Afgjort’s correctness and security.

What is a finality layer?

In blockchains such as Bitcoin, it takes a rather long time before transactions are confirmed. That is because short rollbacks can occur with some probability in these chains. To confirm a transaction with high confidence, one needs to be sure that the block it is in is not rolled back. This confidence can be reached by waiting for sufficiently many blocks to be added after the block in question. This is sometimes referred to as eventual or probabilistic consensus. A finality layer significantly speeds up this process by having a committee that periodically declares blocks in the chain as final, preventing rollbacks beyond final blocks.

About Christian

Christian Matt is a senior researcher at Concordium. Before joining Concordium, he worked at the University of California, Santa Barbara as a postdoctoral scholar. Christian holds a Ph.D. in computer science from ETH Zurich and studied computer science and mathematics at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany. His research spans several areas of cryptography and he has published papers at leading venues for cryptographic research.

Published papers

About Daniel

Daniel Tschudi is a senior researcher at Concordium. Daniel holds a Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees, both in Mathematics, from ETH Zurich. He did his Ph.D. in Computer Science at ETH Zurich under the supervision of Professor Ueli Maurer. His research has been in cryptography with a focus on secure computation protocols. He maintains research interest in cryptocurrencies and anonymous communication. He has published several research papers in leading IACR conferences and distributed computing flagship venues.

Published papers

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