Hamilton Lecture 2016

Professor Shafi Goldwasser (MIT and the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel) will deliver the Royal Irish Academy's 2016 Hamilton Lecture on the 17 October on the topic ‘Modern cryptography in the age of cloud computing’.

Going beyond the basic challenge of private communication, in the last 35 years, cryptography has become the general study of correctness and privacy of computation in the presence of a computationally bounded adversary, and as such has changed how we think of proofs, secrets, and information.

In this talk, Professor Goldwasser will discuss some beautiful developments in the theory of cryptography, and the role it can play in the next successful shift from local to global computation.

Shafi Goldwasser is the RSA Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. She is also a professor of computer science and applied mathematics at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.

Her pioneering contributions include the introduction of interactive proofs, zero knowledge protocols, hardness of approximation proofs for combinatorial problems, and multi-party secure protocols.

She was the recipient of the ACM A. M. Turing Award (2012), the Gödel Prize (1993 and 2001), the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, the RSA Award in Mathematics, the ACM Athena Award for Women in Computer Science, the Benjamin Franklin Medal, and the IEEE Emanuel R. Piore award. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Science; the National Academy of Science and the National Academy of Engineering.

Hamilton Day is kindly supported by Arup and the Irish Times.