Dean's Distinguished Women in Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science Lecture Series

Friday, March 8, 2024

Information Theoretic MPC: Techniques that Age Well

Abstract: The talk will be self-contained and discuss multiparty protocols and their applications. This lecture is presented jointly by the Department of Combinatorics and Optimization and the Women in Mathematics Committee, and is a part of the Tutte Colloquium.

Bio

Tal Rabin is the Rachleff Family Professor of Computer Science at the University of Pennsylvania and a Senior Principal Scientist at AWS (Amazon Web Services). Before that she has been the head of research at Algorand Foundation, and prior to that she was at IBM Research for 23 years as a Distinguished Research Staff Member and the manager of the Cryptographic Research Group.

Tal’s research focuses on secure multiparty computation, threshold cryptography, and proactive security and recently adapting these technologies to the blockchain environment. Her works have been instrumental in forming these areas.

Tal is an ACM Fellow, an IACR Fellow and member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Tal’s work has won the Dijkstra Prize of 2023 and the 30-year test of time award at STOC. She is the 2019 recipient of the RSA Award for Excellence in the Field of Mathematics. She was named by Forbes in 2018 as one of the Top 50 Women in Tech in the world. In 2014 Tal won the Anita Borg Women of Vision Award winner for Innovation and was ranked by Business Insider as the #4 on the 22 Most Powerful Women Engineers.

She has served as the Program and General Chair of the leading cryptography conferences and as an editor of the Journal of Cryptology. She has initiated and organizes the Women in Theory Workshop, a biennial event for graduate students in Theory of Computer Science. Tal is currently the chair of the SIGACT Executive Board.