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.
Amit Sahai is a Simons Investigator (2021), Fellow of the ACM (2018) and a
Fellow of the IACR (2019).
He is also
a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (2021), and Advisor to the
Prison Mathematics Project.
He is the incumbent of the Symantec Endowed Chair in Computer Science.
He received
his Ph.D. in Computer
Science from MIT in
2000. From 2000 to 2004, he was on the faculty at Princeton
University; in
2004 he joined the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, where he currently
holds the position of
Professor
of Computer
Science.
He serves as an editor of
J. Cryptology (Springer-Nature).
His research interests are in security and cryptography, and theoretical
computer science more broadly.
He is the co-inventor of Attribute-Based Encryption, Functional
Encryption, and Indistinguishability Obfuscation.
He has published more
than 150 original
technical research papers at venues such as the ACM Symposium on Theory of
Computing (STOC), CRYPTO, and the Journal of the ACM. He has given
a
number of invited talks at institutions such as MIT, Stanford, and
Berkeley, including the 2004 Distinguished Cryptographer Lecture Series at
NTT Labs, Japan. Professor Sahai is the recipient of numerous honors; he
was named an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellow in 2002,
received an Okawa Research Grant Award in
2007, a Xerox Foundation Faculty Award in 2010,
a Google Faculty
Research Award in 2010, a 2012 Pazy Memorial Award,
a 2016 ACM CCS Test of Time Award, a 2019 AWS Machine Learning
Research Award, a 2020 IACR Test of Time Award (Eurocrypt), and a STOC
2021 Best Paper Award.
For his contributions to the conception and development of
indistinguishability obfusction, he was awarded the 2022 Held Prize by the
National Academy of Sciences.
For his teaching, he was given the 2016
Lockheed Martin Excellence
in Teaching Award from the Samueli School of Engineering at UCLA.
His research has been covered by several news agencies including the
BBC World Service,
Quanta Magazine,
Wired,
and
IEEE Spectrum.
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:
Rex Fernando,
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.
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
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