LOS ALAMITOS, Calif., 16 March 2018 – Dr. Moti Yung, fellow of IEEE and ACM, has been selected to receive the IEEE Computer Society 2018 W. Wallace McDowell Award. Yung is being recognized "for innovative contributions to computer and network security, predicting, both attack scenarios and design needs in this important evolving era.”
Yung is an adjunct senior research faculty member at Columbia University where he worked with and co-advised numerous PhD students over the years. In parallel, Yung has had a research scientist career in industry, where he worked for IBM Research, Certco, RSA Laboratories, Google, and Snap.
Yung’s main professional interests are in Security, Privacy, and Cryptography. His contributions to research and development treat science and technology holistically - from the theoretical mathematical foundations, via conceptual mechanisms which typify computer science, to participation in design and development of industrial products. His published work (articles, patents, a book, and edited books) includes collaborations with more than 300 highly appreciated co-authors.
Yung’s work has been predicting future needs of secure systems and analyzing coming threats, which led to basic theoretical and applied notions, including ransomware attacks, cryptosystems subversion attacks, concurrent sessions in authentication protocols, strong secure encryption, and digital signatures from simplified cryptography.
His industrial work gave rise to new diversified mechanisms, some of which are in extensive use. These include public-key based second factor authentication device; new factors for user identification; distributed signing methods; numerous very large scale (web and mobile) encryption schemes; anonymization of historical user data; transparency and control for web users; secure data collection; secure large-scale distributed computation protocol for privacy-preserving data analytics; and secure cloud storage.
Also a Fellow of the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR), and the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS), Yung gave the IACR Distinguished Lecture in 2010.
Yung is the recipient of the 2014 ACM’s SIGSAC Outstanding Innovation award, the 2014 ESORICS (European Symposium on Research in Computer Security) Outstanding Research award, an IBM Outstanding Innovation award, a Google OC award, and a Google founders’ award.
Yung received his PhD from Columbia University in 1988.
The McDowell Award is given to individuals for outstanding recent theoretical, design, educational, practical, or other innovative contributions in the field of computing. The award may be given for a single contribution of great merit or a series of lesser contributions that have had or are expected to have an important influence on the computer field.
The award consists of a bronze medal and a $2,000 honorarium. The award will be presented at the Computer Society annual awards ceremony to be held on Wednesday, 6 June 2018 in Phoenix, Arizona, USA.
One of computing’s most prestigious individual honors, the W. Wallace McDowell Award has a list of past winners that reads like a who’s who of industry leaders. They include FORTRAN creator John W. Backus (1967); supercomputer pioneers Seymour Cray (1968), Gene Amdahl (1976), and Ken Kennedy (1995); the architect of IBM’s mainframe computer Frederick Brooks (1970); Intel Corp. co-founder Gordon Moore (1978); COBOL creator Grace Murray Hopper (1979); Donald Knuth, the father of algorithm analysis (1980); microprocessor inventor Federico Faggin (1994); World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee (1996); Lotus Notes creator and Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie (2000); and IBM Fellow Ronald Fagin (2012).
