LampsonFest – Ron Rivest, Martin Abadi, Cynthia Dwork

  • Ron Rivest – Reflections on SDSI
  • Martin Abadi – Authentication in distributed systems: Theory and actual practice
  • Cynthia Dwork – Differential Privacy: Dreams and Nightmares

Speaker Details

Professor Rivest is the Viterbi Professor of Computer Science in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, a member of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), a member of that lab’s Theory of Computation Group and a leader of its Cryptography and Information Security Group. He received a B.A. in Mathematics from Yale University in 1969, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1974. His research interests include cryptography, computer and network security, voting systems, and algorithms. Rivest is a co-inventor of the RSA public-key cryptosystem, has extensive experience in cryptographic design and cryptanalysis. He is also a founder of RSA Data Security and of Verisign. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences, and is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, the International Association for Cryptographic Research, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also on the Advisory Board for the Electronic Privacy Information Center. Together with Adi Shamir and Len Adleman, he has received the 2002 ACM Turing Award and the 2009 NEC C&C Award.

Martín Abadi is a computer scientist, currently working at the University of California, Santa Cruz and Microsoft Research. He earned his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1987 as a student of Zohar Manna. He is well-known for his work on computer security and on programming languages, including his paper (with Michael Burrows and Roger Needham) on the Burrows-Abadi-Needham logic for analyzing authentication protocols, and his book (with Luca Cardelli) A Theory of Objects, laying out formal calculi for the semantics of object-oriented programming languages. He is a 2008 Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.

Cynthia Dwork is a theoretical computer scientist, best known for her work in cryptography, distributed computing, and the computational approach to fighting spam. After fifteen years at the IBM Almaden Research Center, she became Staff Fellow at the Compaq Systems Research Center in ‘00, leaving to join MSR in ‘01. Cynthia has also been a consulting professor at Stanford since ‘96, and has taught at Berkeley and the University of Siena. Her recent research efforts have been in data privacy and internet mathematics.

Date:
Speakers:
Cynthia Dwork, Martin Abadi, and Ron Rivest
Affiliation:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Microsoft, MSR Silicon Valley