Aayush Jain, a recent UCLA computer graduate and Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, has received the 2022 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award for his dissertation on “Indistinguishability Obfuscation,” which established the feasibility of mathematically rigorous software obfuscation from well-studied hardness conjectures. Software obfuscation is important as it transforms source code to make it unintelligible without altering what it computes, which is crucial for software security. Indistinguishability obfuscation is considered a theoretical “master tool” in cryptography, helping to achieve long-desired cryptographic goals such as functional encryption while expanding the scope of the field itself. Honorable Mentions were given to Alane Suhr and Conrad Watt, both of whom made transformative contributions in NLP and web engineering.
https://www.acm.org/media-center/2023/may/dissertation-award-2022