Shafi Goldwasser to give cryptography briefing on Capital Hill

Incoming Simons Institute Director Shafi Goldwasser will give a congressional lunch briefing, sponsored by the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI) and the American Mathematical Society (AMS).

"Cryptography: How to Enable Privacy in a Data-Driven World"
Wednesday, December 6, 2017
12:00 pm to 1:30 pm
HVC 215, Capitol Visitor Center
Washington, D.C.

RSVP by November 28th to amsdc@ams.org. 
Lunch will be served. Space is limited at this widely attended public event.

In the last 40 years, the field of cryptography has shown how to use basic mathematics to enable secure electronic commerce. Nowadays, we are faced with a new challenge. Medical breakthroughs, smart infrastructure, economic growth by clever consumer targeting, and surveillance for national security have become possible due to the enormous amounts of data collected on individuals. Yet this data collection seems to stand in contradiction to patients’ rights, consumers’ privacy, unfair pricing, and the basic “Right to Be Left Alone.” The question is, can mathematics and technology make it possible to maintain privacy and make progress at the same time? We will show how modern encryption methods, zero-knowledge proofs, and multiparty secure computation go a long way to get the best of both worlds.

Dr. Shafi Goldwasser is the RSA Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. Goldwasser’s pioneering contributions include the introduction of zero-knowledge interactive proofs, protocols, and multi-party secure protocols, which are key technologies for online identification, utilizing blockchains for distributed transactions and for data-intensive collaborations in regulated industries. Dr. Goldwasser is also incoming director of the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at the University of California, Berkeley.