Recent UCLA Computer Grad Receives ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award
May 24, 2023
Aayush Jain receives the 2022 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award for his dissertation “Indistinguishability Obfuscation From Well-Studied Assumptions,” which established the feasibility of mathematically rigorous software obfuscation from well-studied hardness conjectures.The central goal of software obfuscation is to transform source code to make it unintelligible without altering what it computes. Additional conditions may be added, such as requiring the transformed code to perform similarly, or even indistinguishably, from the original. As a software security mechanism, it is essential that software obfuscation have a firm mathematical foundation.
Jain is an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Jain received a BTech in Electrical Engineering, and an MTech in Information and Communication Technology from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. He received a PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Honorable Mentions for the 2022 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award go to Alane Suhr, an Assistant Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, for her dissertation, “Reasoning and Learning in Interactive Natural Language Systems,” and Conrad Watt, a Research Fellow (postdoctoral) at the University of Cambridge, for his dissertation, Mechanising and Evolving the Formal Semantics of WebAssembly: The Web’s New Low-Level Language.
