The cryptography program at Simons is well under way and we’re wrapping up our second week here at the wonderful Simons Institute at Berkeley. It’s been a roller-coaster ride discussing the thrilling developments in the field: from fully homomorphic encryption to multilinear maps, obfuscation, differential privacy and more. The orientation/bootcamp week was an unqualified success: survey talks are online and can be viewed on the program webpage. Many thanks to the speakers and organizers.
I wanted to highlight another aspect of the program, which I’m also very excited about. Vinod Vaikuntanathan and Daniel Wichs are organizing a weekly “historical papers seminar series” for the program. This series will consist of talks about seminal papers that had, and continue to have, long-lasting impact in cryptography and beyond. The talks will discuss not only the work itself but also its historical context and more broadly how the field has evolved, and where the techniques found applications both in and out of cryptography.
Title: On the growth of cryptography
Speaker: Ronald L. Rivest, Vannevar Bush Professor, MIT
Date: Wednesday, June 3rd at 2 – 3:30 pm
Windows On Theory 