Quick Facts
Biography
Silvio Micali (born October 13, 1954) is an Italian computer scientist at MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and a professor of computer science in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science since 1983. His research centers on the theory of cryptography and information security.
Education
Micali graduated in mathematics at La Sapienza University of Rome in 1978 and earned a Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1982; his PhD thesis adviser was Manuel Blum.
Research
Micali is best known for some of his fundamental early work on public-key cryptosystems, pseudorandom functions, digital signatures, oblivious transfer, secure multiparty computation, and is one of the co-inventors of zero-knowledge proofs.
Awards
Micali won the Gödel Prize in 1993. In 2007, he was selected to be a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the IACR. He is also a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received the Turing Award for the year 2012 along with Shafi Goldwasser for their work in the field of cryptography.
In 2015 the University of Salerno acknowledges his studies giving him an honoris causa degree in Computer Science.