Picture of me on a beach in Olympic National Park, weekend of July 4, 2003

Adam D. Smith

Ph.D. (MIT), 2004
Assistant Professor
Computer Science and Engineering Department
Pennsylvania State University, University Park

I am part of the Theory of Computation and the Systems and Internet Infrastructure Security (SIIS) groups at Penn State. If you are interested in cryptography or theoretical computer science, consider attending the theory seminar (or at least sign up for the mailing list). If you are interested in the CSE graduate program, please look at http://www.cse.psu.edu/academics/graduate/ for information on admission and a description of the program. Research assistantships are available for strong candidates interested in working in cryptography and theory.

My research studies cryptography and privacy and their connections to diverse fields such as information theory, combinatorics, quantum mechanics and statistics. Recently, I've focused on a few specific topics:

  • Privacy-preserving publication of statistical data
  • Cryptography based on noisy secrets ("fuzzy cryptography")
  • Efficient two- and multi-party protocols for tasks such as agreement, commitment and secure function evaluation.
  • Quantum cryptography, and quantum information theory
Here is a more detailed, but still high-level, description: PDF.

During Fall 2006, before coming to Penn State, I was Securing Cyberspace at UCLA's IPAM. Previously, I was a post-doc at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel, hosted by Moni Naor. Before that, I did a Ph.D. in the Computer Science and AI Lab at MIT, under the supervision of Madhu Sudan.

The picture above was taken in
Olympic National Park, Washington
(click for a picture of Maya and me)

Teaching

Students

Contact information

  • Email:
  • Office telephone: +1-814-863-0076
    Fax: +1-814-865-3176
  • Mailing adress:
    338K IST building, College of Engineering
    Department of Computer Science and Engineering
    Pennsylvania State University
    University Park, PA 16802

Professional Information:

Life:

Survey/Tutorial Presentations

Publications and Research

Privacy, as most people realize, is scarce these days. I used to use a service provided by SiteMeter to track visitors to this web page, but removed the link below since some people were bothered by its presence... especially given that it kept detailed records of the times and IP addresses of people who accessed this page. Most web administrators keep such logs as a matter of routine, but they are not necessarily stored for very long, nor made public.

Last modified: Sat Aug 2 15:13:08 EDT 2008
Adam Smith