Cynthia Dwork
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Cornell University (PhD)
- Japan Prize (2026)
- National Medal of Science (2025)
- STOC 30-year Test-of-Time award (2022)
- RSA Award for Excellence in Mathematics (2022)
- Paris Kanellakis Award (2021)
- Knuth Prize (2020)
- Hamming Medal (2020)
- Gödel Prize (2017)
- TCC Test-of-Time Award (2016)
- Dijkstra Prize (2007)
Cynthia Dwork | |
|---|---|
 Dwork lectures at Harvard Kennedy School in 2018 | |
| Born | June 27, 1958 |
| Alma mater | Princeton University (BSE) Cornell University (PhD) |
| Known for | Differential privacy Non-Malleable Cryptography Proof-of-work |
| Awards |
|
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Computer science[1] |
| Institutions | IBM Research Microsoft Research Harvard University |
| Thesis | Bounds on Fundamental Problems in Parallel and Distributed Computation (1984) |
| Doctoral advisor | John Hopcroft[2][3] |
| Website | dwork |
Cynthia Dwork (born June 27, 1958[citation needed]) is an American computer scientist renowned for her contributions to cryptography, distributed computing, and algorithmic fairness. She is one of the inventors of differential privacy and proof-of-work.
Dwork works at Harvard University, where she is Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science, Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and Affiliated Professor at Harvard Law School and Harvard's Department of Statistics.
Dwork received her B.S.E. from Princeton University in 1979, graduating Cum Laude, and receiving the Charles Ira Young Award for Excellence in Independent Research. Dwork received her Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1983[3] for research supervised by John Hopcroft.[4][2]
Career and research
Dwork is known for her research placing privacy-preserving data analysis on a mathematically rigorous foundation, including the invention of differential privacy in the early to mid 2000s, a strong privacy guarantee frequently permitting highly accurate data analysis.[5] The definition of differential privacy relies on the notion of indistinguishability of the outputs irrespective of whether an individual has contributed their data or not. This is typically achieved by adding small amounts of noise either to the input data or to outputs of computations performed on the data.[6] She uses a systems-based approach to studying fairness in algorithms including those used for placing ads.[7] Dwork has also made contributions in cryptography and distributed computing, and is a recipient of the Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize for her early work on the foundations of fault-tolerant systems.[8]
Her contributions in cryptography include non-malleable cryptography with Danny Dolev and Moni Naor in 1991, the first lattice-based cryptosystem with Miklós Ajtai in 1997, 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 ("worst-case/average-case equivalence"). With Naor she also first presented the idea of, and a technique for, combating e-mail spam by requiring a proof of computational effort, also known as proof-of-work — a key technology underlying hashcash and bitcoin.
Selected works
Her publications[1] include:
- Dwork, Cynthia; Lynch, Nancy; Stockmeyer, Larry (1988). "Consensus in the presence of partial synchrony". Journal of the ACM. 35 (2): 288–323. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.13.3423. doi:10.1145/42282.42283. S2CID 17007235. — this paper received the Dijkstra Prize in 2007.
- Dwork, Cynthia; Roth, Aaron (2014). The Algorithmic Foundations of Differential Privacy (PDF). Foundations and Trends in Theoretical Computer Science. Now Publishers. ISBN 978-1601988188.
