Goldwasser and Micali win Turing Award
MIT professors Shafi Goldwasser and Silvio Micali have won the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) A.M. Turing Award for their pioneering work in the fields of cryptography and complexity theory. The two developed new mechanisms for how information is encrypted and secured, work that is widely applicable today in communications protocols, Internet transactions and cloud computing. They also made fundamental advances in the theory of computational complexity, an area that focuses on classifying computational problems according to their inherent difficulty. Goldwasser and Micali were credited for “revolutionizing the science of cryptography” and developing the gold standard for enabling secure Internet transactions. The Turing Award, which is presented annually by the ACM, is often described as the “Nobel Prize in computing” and comes with a $250,000 prize. “For three decades Shafi and Silvio have been leading the field of cryptography by asking fundamental questions about how we share and receive information....