Today, I am supposed to travel to KAUST to deliver the Al-Kindi Distinguished Statistics Lectures, which will be about standard privacy perspective (mostly Dwork et al.’s differential privacy) and our Bayesian 
alternatives, persuasive and adversarial flavours. It ideally (??) fits the named lectures since, quoting from KAUST webpage, the Baghdad polymath delved in philosophy, mathematics, statistics, and cryptanalysis:
“Al-Kindi (801-873 CE), a prominent figure in the House of Wisdom, whose book entitled “Manuscript on Deciphering Cryptographic Messages”, is believed to be the earliest writing on Statistics. In his book, Al-Kindi gave a detailed description of how to decipher encrypted messages using Statistics and frequency analysis. This text arguably gave rise to the birth of both Statistics and cryptanalysis”
But the geopolitics of the region are currently such that I may have to cancel the trip at the very last minute… (The fact that the French president Emmanuel Macron managed to get to Riyadh and back last weekend made me update my prior towards a higher probability of success!)
