Videos of scientific lectures

Kevin McCurley

It's routine for scientists to present and attend lectures on research topics. This is one of the major activities in attending a conference, but it's also routine in the intellectual environment of any research institution. There are times however, when it's not really feasible to attend, but you'd still like to listen to the talk.

I've often wondered what it would be like to listen to lectures by Gauss or Turing or Shannon. I imagine a day when future generations of scientists will be able to listen to long-dead scientists give presentations by watching old videos. For this reason we need to start collecting and organizing them. I started working on this by digitizing videos of talks from the Crypto '98 conference. More recently I've been adding videos to IACR CryptoDB.