# Demo - Cursive Connections

- Channel: [Edge City](https://streameth.org/edge_city)
- Date: 2024-10-14
- Duration: 04:52
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/670ca3702f3849fecfbaa706
- Download: https://vod-cdn.lp-playback.studio/raw/jxf4iblf6wlsyor6526t4tcmtmqa/catalyst-vod-com/hls/c94cotu67uy05vb4/720p0.mp4

## Description

Demo - Cursive Connections

## Transcript

Hi everyone, I'm Vivek. I'm presenting on behalf of a five-person team. Rachel, Tessa, and Steven are all here, if you want to raise your hands. And Andrew is coming in a week. But yeah, I want to talk about Cursive Connections, both what is there today and what we're looking forward to over the next few weeks. A little bit about Cursive, we're a research and design lab building cryptography for human connection. We're a research and design lab building cryptography for human connection. So using a lot of different advanced cryptography tools and trying to figure out ways to enable people to connect and coordinate more effectively with them. And Curse of Connections is an app experience that we're hoping to do exactly that. With one sort of key focus being around importing a lot of data about yourself and choosing how you reveal and share that with other people. So what's the tech behind it? Bunch of fancy three-letter acronyms, but the main tools involved are something called multi-party computation and fully homomorphic encryption. All of this is sort of abstracted behind the UI, but all of this enables kind of privacy-preserving sharing of different data. In addition, there's also a lot of ZK stuff going on, but that's not as much of a focus these days. How to use it. So actually, all attendees that have this sort of black wristband can get started with this. All you have to do is take the kind of white chip on your wristband and tap it with your phone. Top of your iPhone, middle of your Android. Two things to catch is that if you have an Android, make sure NFC is on. And in general, airplane mode has to be off, unfortunately, to use this. And yeah, please come talk to me or Steven afterwards if you're having any difficulties. We're happy to debug that. And there's some more instructions here if you're still trying to figure that out. So where is it at today? Basically, there's two simple features. The first thing is being able to share socials on tap. So as you sign up, you basically set up very simple like Telegram, Twitter, and so when you tap on someone else's badge, you can easily share this sort of thing. And you can also basically attach like labels and notes to people as you meet them to remember kind of context for how you met them and see them sort of in like a big kind of like contacts view. The other sort of like cryptographic feature involved is that as you register, you basically can set up some initial set of tags based on how you want to connect with people at the event. And you can use something called private set intersection to when you're sort of both viewing each other's profiles and you click discover, you can do a little computation to see where the overlap is, both in these sorts of interests as well as shared contacts. So all this right now is very minimal. The past few weeks has been focused on backend work so we can add lots of cool stuff during this month. But coming very soon this week, I just wanted to give some highlights. One thing is a flower garden. So we love visualizing all this sort of stuff for people to learn what's going on behind the scenes. And one thing is every single connection you have will be represented as a flower. And as you learn more stuff about each other, as you interact with each other, as you have more shared context, this flower will grow over the course of the event. And it'll give you this sort of like unique kind of artifact of your experience here at the end of the event. Another thing is just adding a lot more data. Right now, the data is very minimal. It's just a few tags because we want our registration to be really smooth, but we want to have people add custom tags. I know that was a feature request from some folks, as well as importing data from other platforms to give you more stuff to connect over. And finally also just being able to edit all the details in your profile. All of it right now is static, but that'll be added in very soon. And I want to give a little bit of a kind of shout out for some of the main kind of themes we're looking to test by the end of the month. The first is something called narrowcasting. So this is the opposite of broadcasting. And the idea here is instead of kind of posting publicly to a big group chat or like on a public forum like social layer, you can instead set private filters for information that you have and get it to the most relevant folks, where only people that sort of match those criteria will be able to decrypt this information. And we think this can enable a lot more efficient coordination and communication between folks in this community and sort of beyond. The second is this idea of super connectors. So as you meet more people and as you do these sorts of private set intersections and learn more about them, we want the app to basically be able to surface to you like, hey, you know, like, these two people, Alice and Bob, and, you know, from what you know about them, they have a lot in common, or they have a lot of complementary things. And you can start basically, like, kind of bringing your social graph together by recommending folks to meet and get to know each other. And finally is this idea of digital pheromones. Pheromone, for those unfamiliar, is, like, this chemical substance that's produced by animals to coordinate with other people of the same species. And we want to build some sort of like digital version of this, where it's kind of a lightweight undetectable signal that you can discover synergy with in a way that you have full control over. It's privacy preserving, but can just enable kind of more serendipitous and synergistic connections to occur at the event. That's all from us. We're funded by Privacy and Scalable Explorations. Shout out to them, and this is some other places to follow us. Thank you.