Cynthia Dwork

Who is Cynthia Dwork?

Cynthia Dwork, Distinguished Scientist at Microsoft Research, is renowned for placing privacy-preserving data analysis on a mathematically rigorous foundation. A cornerstone of this work is differential privacy, a strong privacy guarantee frequently permitting highly accurate data analysis. Dr. Dwork has also made seminal contributions in cryptography and distributed computing, and is a recipient of the Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize, recognizing some of her earliest work establishing the pillars on which every fault-tolerant system has been built for decades. Her contributions in cryptography include Non-Malleable Cryptography, the first lattice-based cryptosystem, which was also the first public-key cryptosystem for which breaking a random instance is as hard as solving the hardest instance of the underlying mathematical problem, and the idea of, and a technique for, combating e-mail spam by requiring a proof of computational effort. This is the technology underlying hashcash and bitcoin. Dwork is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.