ACISP 2026

Abstract: We will explore the emerging role of cryptographic thinking, modeling, and techniques in addressing core challenges in trustworthy AI, using examples from backdoors, alignment, watermarking, and applications of cryptography to non-cryptographic goals.

Bio: Vinod Vaikuntanathan is the Ford Foundation Professor of Engineering in the EECS Department at MIT, a principal investigator at MIT CSAIL, and the chief cryptographer at Duality Technologies. He earned his BTech degree from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras in 2003, and his SM and PhD degrees from MIT in 2005 and 2009, respectively. After a postdoctoral stint at IBM Research, a year as a researcher at Microsoft, and two years as a faculty member at the University of Toronto, Vinod joined the faculty of MIT EECS in September 2013.

Vinod's research is on the foundations of cryptography and its applications to theoretical computer science at large. He is known for his work on fully homomorphic encryption, a powerful cryptographic primitive that enables complex computations on encrypted data, as well as lattice-based cryptography, which provides a new mathematical foundation for cryptography in the post-quantum world. More recently, he has been interested in the interactions of cryptography with quantum computing, as well as with statistics and machine learning.

Vinod's work has been recognized with the Harold E. Edgerton Faculty Award (2018), the Godel Prize (2022), the Simons Investigator Award (2023), the Distinguished Alumnus Award from IIT Madras (2024), a Best Paper Award from CRYPTO 2024, and test-of-time awards from IEEE FOCS and CRYPTO conferences. He was also named a MacVicar Faculty Fellow in 2024 for exceptional teaching and mentoring.