Professor Rafail Ostrovsky, the Norman E. Friedman Chair in Knowledge Sciences at UCLA, delivered the prestigious Strachey Lecture at the University of Oxford on October 21. This lecture is the Department of Computer Science’s flagship of this public lecture series. Previously hosted lecturers include many giants of theoretical computer science, such as Les Valiant, Mihalis Yannakakis, Andrew Yao, and Christos Papadimitriou.
In Professor Ostrovsky’s talk, “Advances in Garbled Circuits,” he revisited the origins of secure computation, tracing the story from Yao’s groundbreaking introduction of garbled circuits from nearly 40 years ago to recent developments in award-winning Garbled RAM research that enable efficient privacy-preserving computation across isolated or sensitive datasets. Professor Ostrovsky described new directions for garbled circuits beyond classical cryptography, such as “secure agents,” which are autonomous computational entities designed to replace both cumbersome data lakes and “clean-room” workflows.
The event, which drew faculty, students, researchers, and industry guests, underscored the Strachey Lecture’s reputation as one of the United Kingdom’s defining stages for new ideas in Computer Science. Professor Ostrovsky’s selection highlights the growing importance of privacy and security as fundamental pillars of modern computation, charting a path where sensitive data can be used without being exposed.
Professor Ostrovsky received his Ph.D. from MIT and is a leading researcher in cryptography and computer security. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR), and a foreign member of Academia Europaea. His honors include the 2022 W. Wallace McDowell Award, the 2018 RSA Award for Excellence in Mathematics, and the 2017 IEEE Computer Society Edward J. McCluskey Technical Achievement Award.
A recording of the lecture can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmGf0_MRlfI