From High School Troublemaker to Pioneering Theoretical Computer Scientist - The Story of Yael Tauman Kalai

Sunday - July 30 2023, 01:56 UTC - 1 year ago

Yael Tauman Kalai is a pioneering theoretical computer scientist who's won impressive awards and changed the way people think about the internet. She was born and raised in Tel Aviv, Israel, and has worked in the fields of cryptography, distributed computing, and computational game theory. Kalai's work has been foundational to how we protect and verify computation and data in the digital age, and she is currently researching potential applications of quantum computing for building more secure systems.

Yael Tauman Kalai is a pioneering theoretical computer scientist who’s won impressive awards and changed the way people think about the internet. But as a kid, she wasn’t exactly a model student. "I was a troublemaker," she said. "I was basically — not quite, but basically — kicked out of high school." .

Kalai was born and raised in Tel Aviv, Israel, in an academic family. Her father, Yair Tauman, is an economist and game theorist. Her high school classes bored her — one report card documented something like 150 school absences, she recalls, as she preferred to spend her time water skiing and socializing. But her analytical skills were always there. "When my parents didn’t let me go out, often the only way to get my dad to agree was to tell him, ‘OK, give me a math riddle. As hard as you want, but if I solve, I go.’" She usually went.

Her dormant love of math finally awakened in college, when she began to recognize its beauty. Eventually, she discovered she could put this math to use with computers and, specifically, securing information. Now, her work straddles the fields of math and computer science, and her ideas have been foundational to how we protect and verify computation in the digital age. For the past two decades, she has worked to ensure the integrity of our smartphones, cloud connections and even cryptocurrencies. Now a researcher at Microsoft and an adjunct professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she recently won the Association for Computer Machinery’s prestigious ACM Prize in Computing for "breakthroughs in verifiable delegation of computation and fundamental contributions to cryptography." Her latest work also looks to the future, as she considers on how quantum computers may affect the security landscape.

Quanta spoke with Kalai about leaking secrets, verifying the cloud and the funkiness of quantum computing. The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

How did you go from high school troublemaker to an academic?I always knew I loved math, but the math in high school wasn’t interesting in any way. Then I went to study math in undergrad, and I was blown away. It’s the first time in my life where I sat and studied nonstop, from morning to night. I was in euphoria. And I have to say, I was a bit upset, because I thought, "OK, give me a math riddle. As hard as you want, but if I solve, I go.’" She usually went.

Her dormant love of math finally awakened in college, when she began to recognize its beauty. Eventually, she discovered she could put this math to use with computers and, specifically, securing information. Now, her work straddles the fields of math and computer science, and her ideas have been foundational to how we protect and verify computation in the digital age. For the past two decades, she has worked to ensure the integrity of our smartphones, cloud connections and even cryptocurrencies. Now a researcher at Microsoft and an adjunct professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she recently won the Association for Computer Machinery’s prestigious ACM Prize in Computing for "breakthroughs in verifiable delegation of computation and fundamental contributions to cryptography." Her latest work also looks to the future, as she considers on how quantum computers may affect the security landscape.

Quanta spoke with Kalai about leaking secrets, verifying the cloud and the funkiness of quantum computing. The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

How did you go from high school troublemaker to an academic? I always knew I loved math, but the math in high school wasn’t interesting in any way. Then I went to study math in undergrad, and I was blown away. It’s the first time in my life where I sat and studied nonstop, from morning to night. I was in euphoria. And I have to say, I was a bit upset, because I thought, "I can’t believe I could have enjoyed this when I was much younger!" .

What was it about math that captivated you? It’s very clean, elegant and abstract. And some concepts in math are counterintuitive; I remember feeling that studying it was changing me as a person. You learn to be humble, because over and over again you learn that your intuitions are wrong.

But when I was looking for a good research question, everything felt incremental. So I started moving toward computer science. And cryptography was exactly what I was missing, because it deals with real-world problems. Today, cryptography is used everywhere. It is used to ensure that the messages we send are confidential and authentic. When I text with someone, how do I know the message I received is the message that was sent? How do I know that the person who claims to have sent the message is the real person who did? .

Kalai was quickly able to apply her newfound passion to cryptography, and her ideas have been fundamental to how we protect and verify information in the digital age. Using cryptography, she was able to develop solutions that prevent secrets from being leaked, protect data stored in the cloud and verify information that is sent over the internet. In addition, her work has implications for the future of computing, as she looks into potential applications of quantum computing for building more secure systems.