Talk Videos from Crypto 2020

Silvio is a world-renowned cryptographer who earned the Turing Award in 2012 and serves as the Ford professor of Engineering at MIT in Boston, where he has been on staff since 1983. Silvio is also a co-inventor of zero-knowledge proofs and is best known for some of his fundamental early work on public-key crypto systems, pseudorandom functions, digital signatures, oblivious transfer, and secure multiparty computation. He also won the Goedel Prize (in theoretical computer science) and the RSA prize (in cryptography). He is currently working as the founder of Algorand, a blockchain platform that solves the infamous “trilemma” that delivers decentralization, scalability, and security.

I am a senior software engineer in the Applied Cryptography Group in Google NYC. I am also a part-time student at Columbia University where I am lucky to be supervised by Tal Malkin. My research interests lie in the intersection of cryptography and algorithms with a focus on both the theory and practice of privacy-preserving storage protocols.

I graduated from the University of Waterloo in Canada with a Bachelor of Mathematics in both Computer Science and Combinatorics & Optimization. I also competed in algorithm contests where I received a gold medal in the Canadian Computing Competition and a bronze medal at the International Olympiad in Informatics.

I joined Microsoft Research New England in 2008 after being an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Georgia Tech and a postdoc at the Weizmann Institute in Israel and Microsoft Research in Redmond. I graduated from MIT, working in cryptography under the superb supervision of Shafi Goldwasser. I was also extremely fortunate to have the guidance of Adi Shamir for my master’s degree.

My main research interests are Cryptography, the Theory of Computation, and Security & Privacy.