Cynthia Dwork
More info
- Affiliation
- Harvard; previously Microsoft Research and IBM
- Known for
- Differential privacy, proof of work
- Awards
- Gödel Prize 2017
The computer scientist who made privacy measurable with differential privacy — and invented proof of work long before anyone cared about cryptocurrency.
In 1992 Dwork and Moni Naor proposed making email senders solve a computational puzzle first: cheap for someone sending one message, ruinous for a spammer sending millions. The idea is now called proof of work, and it resurfaced in Hashcash and then in Bitcoin. She also did foundational work on consensus under partial synchrony and on non-malleable cryptography.
Her best-known contribution is differential privacy (2006, with McSherry, Nissim and Smith): a mathematical guarantee that the answer to a statistical query barely changes whether or not any one person is in the data. Noise is added on purpose and a privacy budget is spent. The 2020 US Census adopted it, to the loud dismay of demographers.