CS Colloquium
Seny Kamara, Brown University
Host: Anurag Khandelwal
Title: Algorithms for the People
Abstract:
Algorithms have transformed every aspect of society, including communication, transportation, commerce, finance, and health. The revolution enabled by computing has been extraordinarily valuable. The largest tech companies generate a trillion dollars a year and employ 1 million people. But technology does not affect everyone in the same way. In this talk, we will examine how new technologies affect marginalized communities and think about what technology and academic research would look like if its goal was to serve the disenfranchised.
Bio:
Seny Kamara is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Brown University and Chief Scientist at Aroki Systems. Before joining Brown, he was a researcher at Microsoft Research (Redmond Lab).
His research is in cryptography and is driven by real-world problems from privacy, security and surveillance. He has worked extensively on the design and cryptanalysis of encrypted search algorithms, which are efficient algorithms to search on end-to-end encrypted data. He maintains interests in various aspects of theory and systems, including applied and theoretical cryptography, data structures and algorithms, databases, networking, game theory and technology policy.
Seny co-directs the Encrypted Systems Lab and is affiliated with the CAPS group, the Data Science Initiative, the Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies and the Policy Lab.