Multiparty Computations, or How to Know if a Second Date is in Your Future

Tal Rabin, IBM Research
Host: Abhishek Jain

Since it’s introduction in 1982, the area of two and multi-party computation has been an exciting and vibrant research topic. The theoretical research in and the applications of multi-party computations are a source of beautiful results and great importance in the era of the internet and cloud computing. Solutions from this area provide enhanced security and privacy in our connected world. In this talk we will give a flavor of the techniques and discuss various applications introduced in the 30 years of innovation in the field.

Speaker Biography

Tal Rabin is the manager and a research staff member of the Cryptography Research Group at IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center. Her research focuses on the general area of cryptography and, more specifically, on secure multiparty computation, threshold cryptography and proactive security which the National Research Council Cybersecurity Report to Congress identified as “exactly the right primitives for building distributed systems that are more secure”. Rabin obtained her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Hebrew University, Israel in 1994, and was an NSF Postdoc Fellow at MIT between 1994-1996. Following her postdoc, she joined the cryptography group in IBM Research in 1996 and started managing it in 1997. She has served as the Program and General Chair in leading cryptography conferences and is an editor of the Journal of Cryptology. She is a member of the SIGACT Executive Board, serves as a council member of the Computing Community Consortium, and is on the membership committee of the AWM (Association of Women in Mathematics). Rabin is the 2014 Anita Borg Women of Vision Award winner for innovation. She has initiated and organizes the Women in Theory Workshop, a biennial event for graduate students in Theory of Computer Science. Rabin has appeared in the New York Times (“Women Atop their Fields Dissect the Scientific Life”), the World Science Festival and on WNYC’s (NPR) Science Fair.