People
CRCS is composed of members of Harvard’s Computer Science Faculty, Visiting Scholars, Postdoctoral Fellows , and is led by an Executive Committee.
Harvard Computer Science Faculty
Yiling Chen
Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Stephen Chong
Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Harry R. Lewis
McKay Professor of Computer Science and Harvard College Professor
Greg Morrisett
Cutting Professor of Computer Science
David Parkes
McKay Professor of Computer Science
Michael D. Smith
McKay Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
Michael Rabin
T.J. Watson Professor of Computer Science
Stuart Shieber
Welch Professor of Computer Science and Harvard College Professor
Salil Vadhan
Joseph Professor of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics (Faculty Director)
Jim Waldo
McKay Professor of the Practice of Computer Science and Distinguished Engineer of Sun Microsystems Laboratory
Visiting Scholars
Latanya Sweeney
Bio: Latanya Sweeney, PhD is an Associate Professor of Computer Science, Technology and Policy in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. She also founded and serves as the Director of the Data Privacy Lab, which works with real-world stakeholders to solve today’s privacy technology problems. Her work involves creating technologies and related policies with provable guarantees of privacy protection while allowing society to collect and share person-specific information for many worthy purposes. Her work has received awards from numerous organizations, including the American Psychiatric Association, the American Medical Informatics Association, and the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association. The American College of Medical Informatics inducted her as a Fellow in 2006. Dr. Sweeney received her PhD in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2001. Her undergraduate degree in computer science was from Harvard University where she graduated cum laude. She joined the faculty of Carnegie Mellon as an Assistant Professor in 1998. She is the co-Director of the PhD Program in Computation, Organizations and Society at Carnegie Mellon and she is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Privacy Technology. More information about Dr. Sweeney is available at her website privacy.cs.cmu.edu/people/sweeney/index.html.
Postdoctoral Fellows
Allan Friedman
Friedman’s research centers on information technology policy, particularly in the field of cybersecurity, information privacy and the structure of communication networks. His work spans several disciplines in social sciences, public policy and computer science, and explores issues ranging from privacy regulation to end-user security incentive structures to how organizational behavior can be affected by communication networks. Friedman has a degree in computer science from Swarthmore College and a PhD in Public Policy from Harvard University. He is also affiliated with the Program on Networked Governance and the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.
Ian Kash (arriving Fall `09)
Ian Kash’s research uses game theory to study how to design systems for self-interested users. Much of his work has been on the design of scrip systems, which are systems where an artificial currency (scrip) is used to prevent free riding or solve resource allocation problems. Practical systems need to be robust to unexpected behavior, so his work has included issues such as altruism, hoarding, sybils, collusion, and the interaction of byzantine and rational agents. Agents need to be able to efficiently learn how to behave in large systems, so his work has also included multiagent learning. Ian’s Ph.D. studies were at Cornell University, advised by Eric Friedman and Joseph Halpern.
Tyler Moore
Moore’s research interests include the economics of information security, the study of electronic crime, and the development of policy for strengthening security. Moore completed his PhD in Computer Science at the University of Cambridge (UK), supervised by Ross Anderson. His PhD thesis investigated cooperative attack and defense in the design of decentralized wireless networks and through empirical analysis of phishing attacks on the Internet. Moore has co-authored a report for the European Union detailing policy recommendations for overcoming failures in the provision of information security. As an undergraduate, he studied at the University of Tulsa, identifying several vulnerabilities in the public telephone network’s underlying signaling protocols. Moore’s PhD studies were supported by a British Marshall Scholarship and US National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.
Tal Moran
Tal Moran is interested in employing ideas and techniques from theoretical cryptography to design secure systems in the “real world”. Two examples, from Tal’s PhD thesis, are simple protocols for polling sensitive questions that maintain privacy for the responder (using physical envelopes or scratch-off cards), and protocols for human-verifiable, secure elections. These are backed by formal definitions and proofs, making the security assumptions and guarantees explicit, and implementations easier to verify. Tal completed his PhD at the Weizmann Institute of Science, under the supervision of Moni Naor, and his undergraduate and master’s degrees at Tel-Aviv University.
Ariel Procaccia (arriving Fall `09)
Ariel Procaccia’s research interests include Computational Social Choice, Algorithmic Game Theory, and the interplay between these fields and Artificial Intelligence. He received his Ph.D. summa cum laude from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, under the supervision of Prof. Jeffrey Rosenschein. His dissertation, entitled “Computational Voting Theory: Of the Agents, By the Agents, For the Agents”, has won the 2008 IFAAMAS Victor Lesser Best Dissertation Award and Hebrew University’s Schlomiuk Prize. His work in Harvard SEAS is also supported by a Rothschild Postdoctoral Fellowship.
Jeffrey Vaughan(arriving Fall `09)
Jeff Vaughan’s research lies at the intersection of computer security, programming languages, and formal methods. He is particularly interested in access control, information flow, the theory and application of dependent types, and mechanized metatheory. He will be receiving his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania.
Affiliates
Felix Fischer (arriving Spring `10)
Jenn Wortman Vaughan (arriving Fall `09)
Past Visiting Scholars
Yevgeniy Dodis
Yevgeniy Dodis is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at New York University. His main field of research is cryptography and network security, including exposure-resilient cryptography, cryptography and imperfect randomness, cryptography with biometrics and other noisy data, authenticated encryption, hash functions and information-theoretic cryptography. Dr. Dodis received his summa cum laude Bachelors degree in Mathematics and Computer science from New York University in 1996, and his PhD degree in Computer Science from MIT in 2000. Dr. Dodis is the recipient of National Science Foundation CAREER Award and IBM Faculty Award.
Omer Reingold
Reingold is the incumbent of the Walter and Elsie Haas Career Development Chair at the Weizmann Institute of Science ( Israel ). His main fields of research are Computational Complexity and Foundations of Cryptography with a particular emphasis on randomness, derandomization, and Explicit Combinatorial Constructions. From 1999-2004, he was a member of AT&T Labs, Florham Park, NJ, and a visiting member of the School of Mathematics, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ. Reingold completed his Ph.D. at the Weizmann Institute and his undergraduate studies at Tel-Aviv University.
Past Postdoctoral Fellows
Ben Adida
Ben Adida’s research applies cryptography to public policy problems, including secure voting, online identity, and secure health records. He is the Creative Commons representative to the W3C, where he works on interoperable web metadata as chair of the RDF-in-HTML task force. Ben received a PhD from MIT’s Cryptography and Information Security group, under the supervision of Ronald L. Rivest. Previously, Ben co-founded two software startups that developed database-backed web application platforms based on free/open-source software.
Rachna Dhamija
Dhamija’s research interests span the fields of computer security, human computer interaction and information policy. She received a Ph.D. from the School of Information Management and Systems at U.C. Berkeley in 2005. Her thesis focused on the design and evaluation of usable security systems. Previously, Dhamija worked on electronic payment system privacy and security at CyberCash. Her research has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Economist.
Simson L. Garfinkel
Garfinkel has research interests in computer forensics, the emerging field of usability and security, and in personal information management. He is also interested in information policy and terrorism, and has actively published and researched in these areas since the late 1980s. He is also a founder of Sandstorm Enterprises, a computer security firm that develops advanced computer forensic tools used by businesses and governments to audit their systems. Garfinkel writes a monthly column for CSO Magazine and previously wrote a weekly column for The Boston Globe and for Technology Review Magazine. He was a founding contributor of Wired Magazine. Garfinkel is also the author or co-author of fourteen books on computing. He received three Bachelor of Science degrees from MIT in 1987, a master’s of science in journalism from Columbia University in 1988, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT in 2005.
Rachel Greenstadt’s research interests lie at the intersection of privacy, security and multi-agent systems. She received a PhD in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard, advised by Michael D. Smith. Her thesis analyzes the privacy properties of current distributed constraint optimization algorithms and presented new algorithms that perform better with respect to privacy. Previously, she was a Department of Homeland Security fellow and, before that, a M.Eng. student at MIT. Her previous work examined privacy in the context of e-commerce, regulatory regimes, and electronic health care, as well as the application of DRM technology to privacy problems, covert channels, and steganography.
Alon Rosen
Rosen’s main fields of interest are Cryptography and Computational Complexity. Before becoming a visiting postdoc at DEAS, he spent two years as a postdoc in the Cryptography Group of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Rosen completed his Ph.D. at the Weizmann Institute of Science, under the supervision of Oded Goldreich and Moni Naor in 2003.
Executive Committee
Stuart M. Shieber
Welch Professor of Computer Science
Barbara J. Grosz
Higgins Professor of Natural Science
Stephen Kosslyn
Lindsley Professor of Psychology
Michael Rabin
Watson Professor of Computer Science
Salil Vadhan
Joseph Professor of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics (Faculty Director)
Jonathan Zittrain
Berkman Visiting Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies, Harvard Law School
Chair in Internet Governance and Regulation, Oxford University