Women in Computing

Building Cryptography for Big Data

Shweta AgrawalAssociate ProfessorIndian Institute of Technology
WHERE:
Remote/Virtual
SHARE:

Zoom link, Passcode:  368174

Abstract: Cryptography is a beautiful branch of theoretical computer science that seeks to provide guarantees to the art of secret keeping. Today, perhaps the great challenge before cryptography is: how to benefit from the technology enabled by “big data” while safeguarding privacy? The concerns of people in the context of privacy have never been higher, and with good reason, as the revelations of Snowden and Wikileaks have demonstrated. On the other hand, we have already begun to glimpse the sheer power of massive-scale data analysis, with applications ranging from personalized medicine to cloud computing to social science and so on.
In this talk we will examine the question: can we have our cake and eat it too? In our context, can disclosure to data be controlled, so that it can participate in authorized computation but leak nothing beyond what its owner permits? We’ll study the best answers we have so far and the many many exciting questions that remain.

Bio:  Dr. Shweta Agrawal is an associate professor at the Computer Science and Engineering department, at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. She earned her PhD at the University of Texas at Austin, and did her postdoctoral work at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her area of research is cryptography and information security, with a focus on post quantum cryptography. She has won multiple awards such as the prestigious national Swarnajayanti award and a best paper award at the leading conference Eurocrypt.

Faculty Host

Maggie Makar