From Basic Idea to Impact: the story of modern cryptography
Berkeley ACM A.M. Turing Laureate Colloquium
Shafi Goldwasser
Wednesday, September 26, 2018
Banatao Auditorium, Sutardja Dai Hall
3:00 – 4:00 pm
Abstract
Computer science inventions impact every aspect our life. At the basis of these inventions are ideas, stemming from curiosity driven research, which eventually found unimaginable applications, and morphed the world. In this talk, i will highlight this progression from idea to impact in the field of cryptography in the last 40 some years starting from public key cryptography through zero knowledge, multi party secure collaborations, post-quantum cryptography, and distributed public ledgers. The next frontier may be the role of cryptography in the safe use of machine learning. We will discuss an entirely new set of related challenges and opportunities.
Biography
Shafi Goldwasser is the Director of the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing, and a professor of computer science at UC Berkeley. She is also the RSA Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, and a professor of computer science and applied mathematics at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. She was the co-recipient of ACM Turing Award for Probabilistic Encryption in 2012 with Silvio Micali. She was also the recipient of the Gödel Prize in 1993 and another in 2001 for her work on interactive proofs and connections to approximation.