Boston University’s Wang Professorship, awarded for distinguished scholarship and teaching in the natural sciences, mathematics, computer science, or engineering, has been awarded to Computer Science Professor Ran Canetti. The professorship, which is for a five-year renewable term, provides support for recipients’ research and scholarship.
“I’m grateful for, and honored by, the Wang Professorship,” says Canetti. “I view it as a recognition of the importance of the co-design of human-centric, socially aware information systems, along with technology-aware societal structures. I will do my best to use the Wang Professorship to advance these goals for the benefit of humanity in the information age.”
Canetti’s research interests span multiple aspects of cryptography and information security, with emphasis on the design, analysis and use of cryptographic protocols.
Stan Sclaroff, dean of Arts & Sciences, wrote that Canetti is a transformative scholar in his field: “There is no aspect of modern cryptography that has not been profoundly affected by the work of Ran Canetti.…As one measure of his impact, his page on Google Scholar lists over 43,000 citations to his work.”
Sclaroff cited Canetti’s work in online security protocols that “remain secure even when run in complex, messy network environments.…Internet standards like TLS, a protocol suite underlying every secure HTTP transaction conducted on the Web, are held to his criteria. “Professor Canetti’s influence is felt in many other areas of cryptography, from message authentication via his HMAC design (used billions of times daily) to the definition and investigation of basic properties of encryption schemes.”
Ran Canetti is a Director of the Center for Reliable Information System and Cyber Security. He is also a Fellow of the International Association for Cryptologic Research and an associate editor of the Journal of Cryptology and Information and Computation.
Canetti earned his PhD from the Weizmann Institute of Science, was a researcher at IBM Watson Research Center, a research scientist at MIT and a professor at Tel Aviv University. His research is supported by the National Science Foundation and the Defense Department. He earned his PhD from Israel’s Weizmann Institute.
The Wang Professorship was established in 1988 and bears the name of its funder, Wang Laboratories. The former holder of the chair (until 2019) was Professor Stephen Grossberg.
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