Rafail Ostrovsky

Rafail Ostrovsky

Norman E. Friedmann 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. Friedmann Chair in Knowledge Sciences at UCLA Samueli School of Engineering. He is a Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Mathematics at UCLA. He is a Fellow of multiple organizations, including the National Academy of Inventors, 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). Additionally, he is a foreign member of Academia Europaea, with over 360 refereed publications and 16 issued USPTO patents. He was chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Mathematical Foundations of Computing from 2015 to 2018 and was chair of the IEEE Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS) 2011 Program Committee (PC). He also served on over 40 other international conference PCs and is currently serving on the editorial boards of the Journal of ACM and the Algorithmica Journal. 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 the RSA Prize); and the 2022 W. Wallace McDowell Award, the highest award given by the IEEE Computer Society.


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

Teaching



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, Embeddings 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



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