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 AMIT SAHAI
Ph.D., M.I.T., 2000

Symantec Chair Professor of Computer Science
and, by courtesy, Professor of Mathematics

Director, Center for Encrypted Functionalities (an NSF Frontier Center)

Advisor, The Prison Math Project The Prison Math Project

Primary research interests: Foundations of Computer Security and Cryptography. Among my interests: Hiding Secrets in Software -- Secure Program Obfuscation, Cryptographic Proofs and Secure Multiparty Computation.

I'm also interested in many other aspects of computer science. See Research below.

Secure Obfuscation Results: The First Cryptographic General-Purpose Software Obfuscation Scheme, see also: here, and here.

NEW! Indistinguishability Obfuscation from Well-Founded Assumptions

Brief Bio / Statement of Credentials:

Amit Sahai is a Professor of Computer Science and (by courtesy) Mathematics at UCLA, and the incumbent of the Symantec Endowed Chair in Computer Science. He also serves as an Advisor to the Prison Mathematics Project. His primary research interests are in cryptography, coding theory, complexity theory, and security. He is the co-inventor of attribute-based encryption, functional encryption, and indistinguishability obfuscation. His work has been recognized by several honors, including being an invited lecturer at the International Congress of Mathematicians 2022 (ICM 2022), and receiving the 2022 Held Prize by the National Academy of Sciences for his role in the development of indistinguishability obfuscation. For his teaching, he was given the 2016 Lockheed Martin Excellence in Teaching Award from the Samueli School of Engineering at UCLA. Many years ago, he was a member of the 1996 World Champion ACM ICPC Team from UC Berkeley. He is also a Simons Investigator (2021), Fellow of the ACM (2018) and a Fellow of the IACR (2019).


Please see here for a list of selected honors.

My h-number (as of Feb 2022, according to Google Scholar): 85.
For my publications, please check my Google Scholar profile. (An older link to Research and On-Line Papers)
Current Ph.D. Students: Alexis Korb, Paul Lou, Riddhi Ghosal.
Graduated Ph.D. Students in Academia/Research Labs:
Brent Waters. Now Full Professor at UT-Austin.
Manoj Prabhakaran. Was Associate Professor (with tenure) at UIUC. Now Full Professor at IIT Bombay.
Edith Elkind. Now Full Professor at Oxford University, UK.
Vipul Goyal. Now Associate Professor at CMU.
Omkant Pandey. Now Assistant Professor at SUNY Stony Brook.
Nishanth Chandran. Now Researcher at Microsoft Research.
Abhishek Jain. Now Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins University.
Sanjam Garg. Now Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley.
Ran Gelles. Now Senior Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at Bar-Ilan University, Israel.
Divya Gupta. Now Researcher at Microsoft Research.
Prabhanjan Ananth. Now Assistant Professor at UCSB.
Dakshita Khurana. Now Assistant Professor at UIUC.
Saikrishna Badrinarayanan. Now Researcher at Visa Research.
Aayush Jain. Now Assistant Professor at CMU.
Nathan Manohar. Now Research Scientist at IBM T.J. Watson Research.
Rex Fernando, Now postdoctoral researcher at CMU.
Graduated Ph.D. Students in Industry:
Ryan Moriarty. Entrepeneur.
Hakan Seyalioglu. Now at Google.
Abishek Kumarasubramanian. Now at TradeWind Markets.
Akshay Wadia. Now at Stitch Fix.
Vanishree Rao, Now at O(1) Labs
Postdocs and former Postdocs:
Eric Miles (Fall 2014 to 2016), Now at Google.
Omkant Pandey (Fall 2014), Now Assistant Professor at SUNY Stony Brook.
Hemanta Maji (Fall 2011 to 2015), Now Assistant Professor at Purdue.
Shweta Agrawal (Fall 2011 to Summer 2013), Now Assistant Professor at IIT Madras.
Jens Groth (Fall 2005 to Summer 2007), Now Professor at UCL.
Boaz Barak (Summer 2004), Now Professor at Harvard.
Yuval Ishai (Spring/Summer 2002), Now Professor at Technion.
Former Ph.D. students:
Shien Ong (graduated with Ph.D. from Harvard University)
Teaching:
Office hours: By appointment.
Program Committees:
I am (or have been) on the program committees for the following conferences. Be sure to submit your best papers to these conferences, and attend them too!
Eurocrypt 2001, Innsbruck, Austria
Complexity 2002, Montreal, Canada
Program Chair: RANDOM 2003, Princeton, August 24-26, 2003.
IndoCrypt 2004, Chennai, India, December 20-22, 2004.
Theory of Cryptography Conference (TCC) 2005, Cambridge, USA, February 10-12, 2005
ICALP 2005, Lisboa, Portugal, July 11-15, 2005
AsiaCrypt 2005, Chennai, India, December 2005.
STOC 2006 , Seattle, WA, May 2006.
Program Chair: IPAM Workshop on foundations of secure multi-party computation and zero-knowledge, Los Angeles, CA, November 2006
CRYPTO 2007 , Santa Barbara, CA, August 2007.
SODA 2008, San Fransisco, January 2008.
CRYPTO 2008 , Santa Barbara, CA, August 2008.
Eurocrypt 2010, Nice, France, May/June 2010.
Theory of Cryptography Conference (TCC) 2012, Taormina, Italy, March 18-21, 2012
Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS) 2012, New Brunswick, New Jersey, October 20-23, 2012
Program Chair, Theory of Cryptography Conference (TCC) 2013, Tokyo, Japan, March 3-6, 2013
CRYPTO 2014 , Santa Barbara, CA, August 2014.
Program Co-Chair, Simons Institute Workshop on Securing Computation, Berkeley, California, June 8-12, 2015.
STOC 2017, June 19-23, Montreal, Canada
TCC 2017, Baltimore, MD, November 2017.
Eurocrypt 2019, Darmstadt, Germany, May 2019.
Contact:
UCLA - Amit Sahai
Engineering VI, Lab 497, Office 497A
Department of Computer Science
UCLA, Los Angeles, CA 90095
United States of America

Phone: (310) 267-4982
FAX: (310) 825-7578
Email: last name @cs.ucla.edu