Cynthia Dwork is the Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard University John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and Affiliated Faculty at Harvard Law School.

She uses theoretical computer science to place societal problems on a firm mathematical foundation.

Her awards and honors include the National Medal of Science, the IEEE Hamming Medal, the RSA Award for Excellence in Mathematics, the Dijkstra, Gödel, and Knuth Prizes, and the ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award. She is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and the US National Academy of Engineering, and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

Abstract: Differential Privacy and Outcome Indistinguishability have yielded results beyond the areas in which they were conceived. In this talk, we use Differential Privacy to obtain a Reusable Holdout Set, thereby enabling sound exploratory data analysis. We then use Outcome Indistinguishability to obtain a strong complexity-theoretic regularity theorem analogous to Szemerdi’s Graph Regularity Lemma, and explore some corollaries and open questions.