The Association for Computing Machinery’s Committee on Women in Computing (ACM-W) has named Shafi Goldwasser of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Weizmann Institute of Science as the 2008-2009 Athena Lecturer for her outstanding research contributions to cryptography, complexity theory, and number theory. Her research includes the development of zero-knowledge proofs, which enable proving the possession of a particular property or piece of information without revealing the information, fast primality tests, and fundamental results on the hardness of approximating certain NP-complete problems. Goldwasser is the RSA Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and a professor of computer science and applied mathematics at Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.
The Athena Lecturer is invited to present a lecture at an ACM event. Goldwasser will address the ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, sponsored by the ACM Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory (SIGACT), in Washington, DC in May 2009. The award, which celebrates women researchers who have made fundamental contributions to computer science, includes a $10,000 honorarium, which is provided by
