Silvio Micali


Silvio Micali is an Italian computer scientist at MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and a professor of computer science in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science since 1983. His research centers on the theory of cryptography and information security.
Micali won Turing award together with Shafi Goldwasser in 2012.
Micali has been on the faculty at MIT, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department, since 1983. His research interests are cryptography, zero knowledge, pseudorandom generation, secure protocols, and mechanism design.
In 2017, Micali founded Algorand, a fully decentralized, secure, and scalable blockchain which provides a common platform for building products and services for a decentralized economy. At Algorand, he oversees all research, including theory, security and crypto finance.
Micali is the recipient of the Turing Award, of 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.

Education

Micali graduated in mathematics at La Sapienza University of Rome in 1978 and earned a Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1982; for research supervised by Manuel Blum.

Research

Micali is best known for some of his fundamental early work on public-key cryptosystems, pseudorandom functions, digital signatures, oblivious transfer, secure multiparty computation, and is one of the co-inventors of zero-knowledge proofs. His former doctoral students include Mihir Bellare, Bonnie Berger, Shai Halevi, Rafail Ostrovsky, Rafael Pass, Chris Peikert, and Phillip Rogaway.

Awards and honors

Micali won the Gödel Prize in 1993. In 2007, he was selected to be a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the International Association for Cryptologic Research. He is also a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received the Turing Award for the year 2012 along with Shafi Goldwasser for their work in the field of cryptography.
In 2015 the University of Salerno acknowledged his studies by giving him an honoris causa degree in Computer Science.
He was elected as an ACM Fellow in 2017.