An Expedition into Modern Cryptography

Speaker:	Professor Andrew Yao
		Winner of the A.M. Turing Award

Title:		"An Expedition into Modern Cryptography"

Date:		Saturday, 13 Nov 2004

Time:		11:00am - 12 noon

Venue:		Citigroup Lecture Theater (Lecture Theater A)
		HKUST

Abstract:

Since ancient times, cryptographic techniques have been used to hide the
true meaning of documents from unintended readers.  For instance, in the
classical Caesar's cipher, the phrase "I come I see and I conquer" might
be written as "K eqog K ugg cpf K eqpswgt" in which every letter of the
alphabet is shifted forward by two places.  In recent decades electronic
communication has helped fuel the rapid development of cryptography into
an active research area, with applications far beyond the simple
encryption of documents.  In this talk we give an exposition of some key
ideas central to this new science, together with a number of intriguing
applications.  We will see how mathematics, physics and computer science
all come into play in this multi-disciplinary field.



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Biography:

Prof Andrew Yao is the only Chinese to receive the Association of
Computing Machinery's A M Turing Award (2000), which is considered the
Nobel Prize of computer science. The A M Turing Award was granted to Prof.
Yao "in recognition of Prof Yao's fundamental contributions to the theory
of computation" and the fact that he "has helped shape the theory of
computation" and "established new paradigms and effective techniques in
many areas" of theoretical computer science.

Among his many other distinguished accolades, Prof Yao is the recipient of
the George Polya Prize from the Society for Industrial and Applied
Mathematics, and in 1996 he became the first winner of the Donald E Knuth
prize for outstanding contributions to the foundations of computer
science. Prof Yao is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Academia Sinica, and the Chinese
Academy of Sciences. He has held academic positions at MIT, Stanford,
Berkeley, and most recently as the William and Edna Macaleer Professor of
Engineering and Applied Science at Princeton University. In August 2004,
he proceeded from Princeton to take up the post of Professor in the Centre
for Advanced Study at Tsinghua University.