Rafail Ostrovsky

Rafail Ostrovsky

Norman E. Friedman Chair in Knowledge Sciences
Distinguished Professor of Computer Science;
Distinguished Professor of Mathematics (by courtesy);
Director of Center for Information and Computation Security
at Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science;
UCLA, Los Angeles, CA 90095




Rafail Ostrovsky holds Norman E. Friedman Chair in Knowledge Sciences at UCLA Samueli School of Engineering. He is a Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and a Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at UCLA. He is a Fellow of multiple organizations, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR); and a foreign member of Academia Europaea, with over 350 refereed publications and 15 issued USPTO patents. He served as chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Mathematical Foundations of Computing from 2015 to 2018 and served as a Chair of IEEE Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS) 2011 Program Committee (PC). He also served on over 40 other international conference PC's and is currently serving on the editorial boards of Journal of ACM, Algorithmica Journal, and Journal of Cryptology. He is the recipient of multiple awards and honors including 1993 Henry Taub Prize; the 2017 IEEE Computer Society Edward J. McCluskey Technical Achievement Award; the 2018 RSA Award for Excellence in Mathematics (also known as RSA Prize); and the 2022 W. Wallace McDowell Award, the highest award given by the IEEE Computer Society.


Teaching

Interested in working with me, or becoming my postdoc or visiting? (Please read this BEFORE EMAILING ME).



Research Interests

I am interested in all aspects of theory of computation, especially in cryptography, network algorithms, and search and classification of large-scale, high-dimensional data. I find these topics fascinating to work on, not only due to their philosophical and theoretical centrality in computer science, but also due to their practical significance. Below, is a more detailed list of topics, with links to papers written on each topic. (You can also search Publications by Year or Google Scholar or DBLP.)

Publications by Topic

Publications: Cryptography

Private Information Retrieval, Privacy-preserving datamining, and Searching on Encrypted Data

Zero Knowledge, Non-Interactive Zero-Knowledge, Knowledge Complexity

Biometric Identification, Position-Based Identification, Passwords and Digital Signatures

Secure Two-Party and Multi-Party Computation

Non-Malleable Commitment Protocols, and Commitments with special properties.

Hash Functions

Issues of Anonymity

Public-Key Encryption with Additional Properties, PKI and Identity revocation.

Cryptographic Applications: Electronic Voting, Micropayments, Visual crypto

Hardware-based Security

Systems Security

Publications: Search and Analysis of High-Dimensional Data

Algorithms for Streaming Data

Dimension Reduction, Emeddings and Geometric search

Clustering Algorithms for high-dimensional data

Publications: Distributed Control Theory, Network Algorithms and Combinatorial Algorithms

Admission Control and Network Routing Algorithms

Distributed Algorithms with severely limited memory per processor

Symmetry Breaking

Distributed Control Theory and Error-Correcting Codes

Synchronization in Distributed Networks

Combinatorial Algorithms






Short Bio

Rafail Ostrovsky is a Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at UCLA. Prof. Ostrovsky joined UCLA in 2003 as a full tenured professor, coming from Bell Communications Research where he was a Senior Research Scientist. Prof. Ostrovsky graduated 28 Doctoral Students and hosted 7 Postdoctoral Fellows. He is currently advising three Ph.D. students. Prior to beginning his career at Bellcore, he was an NSF Mathematical Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellow at UC Berkeley. Dr. Ostrovsky received his Ph.D. in computer science from MIT in 1992, (advisor: Silvio Micali, thesis: Software Protection and Simulation on Oblivious RAM), supported by IBM Graduate Fellowship. Prof. Ostrovsky is a Fellow of ACM; Fellow of IEEE; Fellow of IACR; and a foreign member of Academia Europaea. He has 15 U.S. patents issued and over 300 papers published in refereed journals and conferences. Dr. Ostrovsky has served as a Chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Mathematical Foundations of Computing from 2015-2018 and has served on over 40 international conference Program Committees including serving as PC chair of FOCS 2011. He is a member of the Editorial Board of Journal of ACM; Editorial Board of Algorithmica; and the Editorial Board of Journal of Cryptology and is the recipient of multiple awards and honors including the 2017 IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award and the 2018 RSA Excellence in the Field of Mathematics Award. At UCLA, Prof. Ostrovsky heads the Center of Information and Computation Security (CICS) a multi-disciplinary Research Center (http://www.cs.ucla.edu/security/) at Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science.

Selected Honors and Awards

Dr. Ostrovsky's awards include:


Some Current and Past Professional Activities



Current:Past:




Recent Invited Talks (from September 2005)






Current and Former Students, Postdocs and Visitors

Current Ph.D. Students: Doctoral Students (listed by graduation year): Hosted Postdoctoral Researchers: Visitors:


Useful and Fun Links

Useful: Fun:




Contact Info

Professor Rafail Ostrovsky
University of California, Los Angeles
Department of Computer Science
Office 475, Engineering VI
Los Angeles CA 90095-1596
(310) 206-5283 (office)
(310) 825-7578 (department fax, include cover page)


Email:
my first name (at) cs.ucla.edu
Please read this before emailing me.

Administrative assistant: Ms. Osanna Kazarian;
Phone: (310) 825-1322;
Email: osannak (at) cs.ucla.edu