Cybersecurity expert to speak about privacy

Shafi Goldwasser, winner of the Association for Computing Machinery’s A.M. Turing Award, will speak Friday at IU.

Her lecture is part of the School of Informatics and Computing’s Distinguished Speaker Series.

Goldwasser is a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

An expert in the field of provable security — any type of security that can be proven — Goldwasser will speak on “The Cryptographic Lens.”

Chung-chieh “Ken” Shan, an assistant professor in the School of Informatics and Computing, said the lecture should appeal to anyone interested in how their private information is made accessible.

“As an elder in computer science once said, in computer science, a result after 10 years is either classic or incorrect. Goldwasser’s work is classic,” Shan said, according to a March 12 IU press release. “Everyone in the world depends on her work, and anyone who cares about how their medical, financial and other private information should be kept secret from governments, corporations and other individuals should come to her talk.”

The A.M. Turing Award, which Goldwasser received in 2012, is given for major contributions of lasting importance to computing.

It is the ACM’s most prestigious technical award. With the honor comes a cash prize of $250,000 underwritten by Intel Corporation and Google in recent years.

Goldwasser wont the Turing Award — considered the Nobel Prize for computing science — for her work in mathematics that makes modern cryptography possible.

She received the award along with MIT’s Silvio Micali.

In addition to her most recent accolades, Goldwasser won the National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award.

She is also a recipient of the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award for exceptional young computer professionals.

Goldwasser was awarded the Godel Prize twice. As well, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Science, the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering.

Grace Palmieri