Yael Tauman Kalai

In this episode, we discuss how Yael started working in the field, choosing foundational research problems, privacy-preserving tools such as ring-signatures used in cryptocurrencies (Monero) and recent breakthroughs in schemes that allow hiding secrets in program code. Did you know that ring-signatures came from the motivation to understand the Fiat-Shamir paradigms? Who will get the credit for the recent breakthroughs in program obfuscation? Did you know the history of the famous IP = PSPACE result? Listen to the podcast to learn the answers. Quotes from the show: “I won’t be happy with myself if my work is buried and not applied anywhere”, “The world brings problems to you”. Some referenced papers:  * R. Gay and R. Pass. Indistinguishability Obfuscation from Circular Security, https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/1010.* A. Jain, H. Lin, and A. Sahai. Indistinguishability Obfuscation from Well-Founded Assumptions, https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/1003.* C. Lund, L. Fortnow, H.J. Karloff, and N. Nisan. Algebraic Methods for Interactive Proof Systems. * A. Shamir. IP = PSPACE.