Crypto for the People
Wednesday, April 13th from 6:30-8:00 p.m.
Speaker: Seny Kamara
Cryptography underpins a multitude of critical security- and privacy-enhancing technologies. Recent advances in modern cryptography promise to revolutionize finance, cloud computing and data analytics. But cryptography does not affect everyone in the same way. In this talk, I will discuss how cryptography benefits mostly industry and not people. In contrast, I will also provide examples of cryptography research motivated by social problems and discuss some of the challenges in conducting this research.
Click here to watch this recording on Youtube!
Brown University
Seny Kamara is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Brown University. Before joining Brown, he was a researcher at Microsoft Research.
His research is in cryptography and is driven by real-world problems from privacy, security and surveillance. He has worked extensively on the design and cryptanalysis of encrypted search algorithms, which are efficient algorithms to search on end-to-end encrypted data. He maintains interests in various aspects of theory and systems, including applied and theoretical cryptography, data structures and algorithms, databases, networking, game theory and technology policy.
At Brown, he co-directs the Encrypted Systems Lab and the Computing for the People project and is affiliated with the Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies, the Policy Lab and the Data Science Initiative.
Photo credits:Mark Elzey