Yael Tauman Kalai | |
---|---|
Born | |
Alma mater | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
Known for | Ring Signatures, the insecurity of the Fiat–Shamir heuristic, delegating computation |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Cryptography, Computer Science |
Institutions | Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Microsoft Research |
Doctoral advisor | Shafi Goldwasser |
Doctoral students | Elette Boyle |
Yael Tauman Kalai is a cryptographer and theoretical computer scientist and is the Ellen Swallow Richards Professor at MIT in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. [1] Prior to that, she worked as a Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research New England [2] [3] .
Kalai graduated from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1997. She worked with Adi Shamir at the Weizmann Institute of Science, earning a master's degree there in 2001, and then moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she completed her PhD in 2006 with Shafi Goldwasser as her doctoral advisor. She did postdoctoral study at Microsoft Research and the Weizmann Institute before becoming a faculty member at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She took a permanent position at Microsoft Research in 2008. [2] [3] She serves on the Scientific Advisory Board for the Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics (ICERM). [4]
Kalai is known for co-inventing ring signatures, which has become a key component of numerous systems such as Cryptonote and Monero (cryptocurrency). Subsequently, together with her advisor Shafi Goldwasser, she demonstrated an insecurity in the widely used Fiat–Shamir heuristic. Her work on delegating computation has applications to cloud computing. [5]
Kalai was an invited speaker on mathematical aspects of computer science at the 2018 International Congress of Mathematicians. [6]
Her master's thesis introducing ring signatures won an outstanding master's thesis award [3] and MIT PhD dissertation was awarded the George M. Sprowls Award for Outstanding PhD Thesis in Computer Science. [3] [7]
She was co-chair of the Theory of Cryptography Conference in 2017. [8]
She was awarded the 2022 ACM Prize in Computing "for breakthroughs in verifiable delegation of computation and fundamental contributions to cryptography". [9]
Kalai is the daughter of game theorist Yair Tauman. [10] Her husband, Adam Tauman Kalai, also works at Microsoft Research. [11]
Adi Shamir is an Israeli cryptographer and inventor. He is a co-inventor of the Rivest–Shamir–Adleman (RSA) algorithm, a co-inventor of the Feige–Fiat–Shamir identification scheme, one of the inventors of differential cryptanalysis and has made numerous contributions to the fields of cryptography and computer science.
Ronald Linn Rivest is an American cryptographer and computer scientist whose work has spanned the fields of algorithms and combinatorics, cryptography, machine learning, and election integrity. He is an Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and a member of MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and its Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
Manuel Blum is a Venezuelan born American computer scientist who received the Turing Award in 1995 "In recognition of his contributions to the foundations of computational complexity theory and its application to cryptography and program checking".
Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) is a research institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) formed by the 2003 merger of the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) and the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Housed within the Ray and Maria Stata Center, CSAIL is the largest on-campus laboratory as measured by research scope and membership. It is part of the Schwarzman College of Computing but is also overseen by the MIT Vice President of Research.
Shafrira Goldwasser is an Israeli-American computer scientist and winner of the Turing Award in 2012. She is the RSA Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology; a professor of mathematical sciences at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel; the director of the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at the University of California, Berkeley; and co-founder and chief scientist of Duality Technologies.
Silvio Micali is an Italian computer scientist, professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the founder of Algorand, a proof-of-stake blockchain cryptocurrency protocol. Micali's research at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory centers on cryptography and information security.
Moni Naor is an Israeli computer scientist, currently a professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science. Naor received his Ph.D. in 1989 at the University of California, Berkeley. His advisor was Manuel Blum.
Non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs are cryptographic primitives, where information between a prover and a verifier can be authenticated by the prover, without revealing any of the specific information beyond the validity of the statement itself. This makes direct communication between the prover and verifier unnecessary, effectively removing any intermediaries.
In cryptography, the Fiat–Shamir heuristic is a technique for taking an interactive proof of knowledge and creating a digital signature based on it. This way, some fact can be publicly proven without revealing underlying information. The technique is due to Amos Fiat and Adi Shamir (1986). For the method to work, the original interactive proof must have the property of being public-coin, i.e. verifier's random coins are made public throughout the proof protocol.
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Bonnie Anne Berger is an American mathematician and computer scientist, who works as the Simons professor of mathematics and professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the head of the Computation and Biology group at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Her research interests are in algorithms, bioinformatics and computational molecular biology.
Jill P. Mesirov is an American mathematician, computer scientist, and computational biologist who is the Associate Vice Chancellor for Computational Health Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. She previously held an adjunct faculty position at Boston University and was the associate director and chief informatics officer at the Eli and Edythe L. Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.
The RSA Conference (RSAC) Award for Excellence in Mathematics is an annual award. It is announced at the annual RSA Conference in recognition of innovations and contributions in the field of cryptography. An award committee of experts, which is associated with the Cryptographer's Track committee at the RSA Conference (CT-RSA), nominates to the award persons who are pioneers in their field, and whose work has had applied or theoretical lasting value; the award is typically given for the lifetime achievements throughout the nominee's entire career. Nominees are often affiliated with universities or involved with research and development in the information technology industry. The award is cosponsored by the International Association for Cryptologic Research.
Anna A. Lysyanskaya is a cryptographer known for her research on digital signatures and anonymous digital credentials. She is the James A. and Julie N. Brown Professor of Computer Science at Brown University.
Ran Canetti is a professor of Computer Science at Boston University. and the director of the Check Point Institute for Information Security and of the Center for Reliable Information System and Cyber Security. He is also associate editor of the Journal of Cryptology and Information and Computation. His main areas of research span cryptography and information security, with an emphasis on the design, analysis and use of cryptographic protocols.
Adam Tauman Kalai is an American computer scientist who specializes in machine learning and recently moved to OpenAI after being a Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research New England.
Elette Boyle is an American and Israeli computer scientist and cryptographer, known for her research on secret sharing, digital signatures, and obfuscation. She is a professor of computer science at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, where she directs the Center for Foundations and Applications of Cryptographic Theory.
Tal Geula Malkin is an Israeli-American cryptographer who works as a professor of computer science at Columbia University, where she heads the Cryptography Lab and the Data Science Institute Cybersecurity Center.
Vinod Vaikuntanathan is a professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a principal investigator at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. His work is focused on cryptography, including homomorphic encryption. He is the co-recipient of the 2022 Gödel Prize, together with Zvika Brakerski and Craig Gentry. He also co-founded the data start-up Duality, which utilizes technologies he developed revolving around homomorphic encryption.