Theoretical computer science can be as remote and abstract as pure mathematics, but new research often begins in response to concrete, real-world problems. Such is the case with the work of Cynthia Dwork.
Over the course of a distinguished career, Dwork has crafted rigorous solutions to dilemmas that crop up at the messy interface between computing power and human activity. She is most famous for her invention in the early to mid-2000s of “differential privacy,” a set of techniques that safeguard the privacy of individuals in a large database. Differential privacy ensures, for example, that a person can contribute their genetic information to a medical database without fear that anyone analyzing the database will be able to figure out which genetic information is hers — or even whether she has participated in the database at all. And it achieves this security guarantee in a way that allows researchers to use the database to make new discoveries.
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