Silvio Micali, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Tuesday, May 26, 2015 18:00
Amphi 25, Sorbonne University - Faculté des Sciences

Proofs, Secrets, and Computation

Silvio Micali has received his Laurea in Mathematics from the University of Rome, and his PhD in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley. Since 1983 he has been a member of the MIT faculty, in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department, where is currently is the Associate Department Haead.

Silvio’s research interests are cryptography, zero knowledge, pseudo-random generation, secure protocols, and mechanism design.

Silvio has received the Turing Award, the Gödel Prize, and the RSA prize. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

We show how Theory of Computation has revolutionized our millenary notion of a proof, revealing its unexpected applications to our new digital world. In particular, we shall demonstrate how interaction can make proofs much easier to verify, dramatically limit the amount of knowledge released, and yield the most secure identification schemes to date.

One particularly popular moment associated to the colloquium is the “Master Class” where students have the opportunity to give a short (but well-prepared) presentation of his/her work. Each presentation (10 minutes) is followed by an open discussion with the guest speaker (15 minutes) who gives a detailed feedback. The complete program is provided here.

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