| 1 | Name: | Dr. Cynthia Dwork | |
| Institution: | Harvard University | ||
| Year Elected: | 2016 | ||
| Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | ||
| Subdivision: | 107 | ||
| Residency: | Resident | ||
| Living? : | Living | ||
| Birth Date: | 1958 | ||
Cynthia Dwork, an intellectual leader in the privacy-research community in computer science, has made fundamental contributions that speak to the role of information technology in society. She is leader and a co-founder of work on "differential privacy", which provides the first satisfactory theory for how to ensure privacy protection while enabling statistical analysis of large datasets with sensitive personal information. Her foundational work in this area has had revolutionary impact in such other disciplines as statistics and technology policy. Dwork has also made fundamental contributions to cryptography and distributed algorithms, including introducing the challenge of concurrent security in cryptographic protocols, the fundamental concept of "nonmalleability" in cryptography (where an adversary should not be able to modify cryptographic communications), and the idea of using hash chains as proofs of work (an idea underlying cryptocurrencies like BitCoin). Her distributed computing paper, "Achieving consensus in the presence of partial synchrony" received the Djikstra prize. She received the Goedel Prize in 2017 and the IEEE Hamming Medal in 2019. | |||