An honorary degree in Cybersecurity will be presented by the rector of Sapienza Antonella Polimeni to Silvio Micali, professor of Computer Science at MIT in Boston and alumnus of Sapienza, the first and only Italian to win the prestigious Turing Award in fifty years of history.
Micali is considered one of the leading experts in cryptography: in 2012 he received the Turing Award with colleague Shafi Goldwasser for discovering the “foundations of modern cryptography theory“.
The awarding of the honorary degree was motivated by the Sapienza academics “for Micali’s epochal contribution to Cybersecurity which laid the mathematical and conceptual foundations that allowed the transformation of cryptography into a science through the paradigm of demonstrable security, and for having introduced revolutionary concepts that have found, and still find, countless applications, including computational indistinguishability, pseudorandomicity, probabilistic encryption and semantic security, interactive proofs and zero-knowledge proofs“.
The ceremony will be opened by the opening address of the rector Antonella Polimeni. This will be followed by the speech given by the Dean of the Faculty of Information Engineering, Computer Science and Statistics Marco Schaerf, and the eulogy by Daniele Venturi, professor of the Department of Computer Science. The morning will end with a Lectio magistralis by Silvio Micali entitled From consensus to agreement: the evolution of the public blockchain.