Japan Prize Laureates

Laureates of the Japan Prize

Prof. Cynthia Dwork

Cynthia Dwork, Ph.D.

  • Nationality:
    USA
  • Date of Birth:
    June 27th,1958 (67)

Outline of Achievements

Outline of Achievements

The 2026 Japan Prize

  • Field:
    Electronics, Information, and Communication
  • Achievement:
    Contribution to leading research for building an ethical digital society, including differential privacy and fairness

Education

1979 BSE (with Honors), in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Princeton University
1981 M.Sc. in Computer Science, Cornell University
1983 Ph.D. in Computer Science, Cornell University

Professional Experience

1983-1985 Bantrell Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, MIT Laboratory for Computer Science
1985-2000 Research Staff Member, IBM Almaden Research Center
2000-2001 Staff Fellow, Compaq Systems Research Center
2001-2023 Microsoft Research, Silicon Valley Campus; Title on resignation: Distinguished Scientist
2017-2022 Radcliffe Alumnae Professor, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study
2017- Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science, Harvard Paulson School of Engineering

Academic Journals

  • “Calibrating Noise to Sensitivity in Private Data Analysis” Cynthia Dwork, Frank McSherry, Kobbi Nissim, Adam Smith Theory of Cryptography Conference (TCC 2006) pp. 265-284.
  • “Fairness through awareness” Cynthia Dwork, Moritz Hardt, Toniann Pitassi, Omer Reingold, Richard S. Zemel Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science Conference (ITCS 2012) pp. 214-226
  • “Pricing via Processing or Combatting Junk Mail” Cynthia Dwork, Moni Naor CRYPTO 1992, pp.139–147

Awards

2007 Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize, for Consensus in the Presence of Partial Synchrony, by Dwork, Lynch, and Stockmeyer
2008 Member of the National Academy of Engineering
2008 Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
2014 Member of the National Academy of Sciences
2015 Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery
2016 Theory of Cryptography Conference Test of Time Award, for Calibrating Noise to Sensitivity in Private Data Analysis, by Dwork, McSherry, Nissim, and Smith
2016 Fellow of the American Philosophical Society
2017 Gödel Prize, for Calibrating Noise to Sensitivity in Private Data Analysis, by Dwork, McSherry, Nissim, and Smith
2020 Donald E. Knuth Prize
2020 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Richard W. Hamming Medal
2022 ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award, for fundamental contributions to the development of differential privacy, with Blum, Dinur, McSherry, Nissim, and Smith
2022 RSA Conference Award for Excellence in Mathematics, co-sponsored by the International Association of Cryptologic Research (IACR)
2022 30-Year Test-of-Time Award, STOC, for Non-Malleable Cryptography, Dolev, Dwork, and Naor
2023 Test-of-Time Award, ICML, for Learning Fair Representations, R. Zemel, Y. Wu, K. Swersky, T. Pitassi, and C. Dwork
2024 National Medal of Science
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