IT Lightning Talks: session #27

Friday 7 Nov 2025, 10:00 → 11:30 Europe/Zurich

31/3-004 - IT Amphitheatre (CERN)

Elizaveta Ragozina (CERN), Pedro Ferreira (CERN), Sebastian Lopienski (CERN), Hugo Gonzalez Labrador (CERN)

IT Lightning Talks (ITLT) are short presentations on any topic related to computing technology or to the IT department. See more here: https://twiki.cern.ch/IT/LightningTalks/

10:00 → 10:03 Welcome

Speakers: Elizaveta Ragozina (CERN), Hugo Gonzalez Labrador (CERN), Pedro Ferreira (CERN), Sebastian Lopienski (CERN)

10:03 → 10:10 Security vulnerability in open-source project

I recently discovered a critical CVE in a popular open-source project (CVSS=10.0) and would like to give a quick talk about it: how I discovered it, the unexpected way I bypassed a function which should've prevented command injections, and the uniquely high possible impact (as the tool is used for red-teaming by cybersecurity teams).

Speaker: Dawid Kulikowski (Twente Technical University (NL))

10:10 → 10:17 Discover alternative operating systems for phones

Android and iOS? They’re not the only options! Join me as we explore the fascinating world of alternative OSes and find out which ones shine in different situations.

Speaker: Antoine Duparay (CERN)

10:17 → 10:24 From Source to OCI: Comparing S2I and Paketo Buildpacks

Building OCI images efficiently is at the core of modern cloud-native workflows. In this lightning talk, I’ll compare two common approaches - Source-to-Image (S2I) and Paketo Buildpacks - focusing on how they construct OCI images, their trade-offs in transparency, reproducibility, and developer experience, and what this means in practice. I’ll briefly illustrate our experience applying both methods to Python (acc-py) environments and how these images integrate with a Knative-based platform at CERN.

Speaker: Alexandra Murariu

10:24 → 10:31 Self-healing URLs

A while back, a Laravel (PHP framework) news blog post caught my attention: it discussed the concept and implementation of "self-healing" URLs. I wanted to expand on the idea and play around with it in Flask, and after many weekends later, I developed a Python package for this.

Speaker: Dominic Hollis

10:31 → 10:38 Metaprogramming in Scala

Metaprogramming enables writing code that generates or transforms other code, unlocking powerful abstractions and opportunities for compile-time optimizations. This talk explores the metaprogramming framework offered by the Scala 3 programming language through concrete examples.

Speaker: Florian Cassayre (CERN)

(Draft) Metaprogramming in Scala.pdf

Repository

10:38 → 10:45 Real‑Time Translation in Real Life: What It Could Be

Real-time translation today is good! It really works for personal conversations. But its user experience still breaks normal human interaction because of the latency. I’d like to share my thoughts on that.

Speaker: Alexandr Strekalovskiy (Massachusetts Inst. of Technology (US))

10:45 → 10:52 Designing Yet anOther hardware Description Language (YODL)

Over the past few months, I set out to understand how hardware designs can be expressed through software — by building my own Hardware Description Language, YODL.
In this talk, I’ll share what I learned along the way, from translating high-level circuit descriptions to the low-level representations that ultimately run on FPGAs.

Speaker: Nathan Soufflet

Github repository