Professor Rivest is a MIT Institute Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and a leader of the Cryptography and Information Security research group within MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He received a B.A. in Mathematics from Yale University in 1969, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1974.
He is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is also a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences. He is a recipient of the ACM Turing Award.
Professor Rivest is an inventor of the RSA public-key cryptosystem, and a founder of RSA Data Security. He has extensive experience in cryptographic design and cryptanalysis, and has published numerous papers in these areas. He has served a Director of the International Association for Cryptologic Research, the organizing body for the Eurocrypt and Crypto conferences. He was worked extensively in the areas of algorithms, machine learning, election security, and digital contact-tracing.
We seek to develop techniques for securing tomorrow's global information infrastructure by exploring theoretical foundations, near-term practical applications, and long-range speculative research.
This community is interested in understanding and affecting the interaction between computing systems and society through engineering, computer science and public policy research, education, and public engagement.
The goal of the Theory of Computation CoR is to study the fundamental strengths and limits of computation as well as how these interact with mathematics, computer science, and other disciplines.
Theory research at CSAIL covers a broad spectrum of topics, including algorithms, complexity theory, cryptography, distributed systems, parallel computing and quantum computing.
