LTL2016 at Harvard University: Boaz Barak

Boaz Barak: “Speaking about unspeakables” Boaz Barak is the Gordon McKay professor of Computer Science at Harvard University’s John A. Paulson school of Engineering and Applied Sciences. His research interests include all areas of theoretical computer science and in particular cryptography and computational complexity. Previously, he was a principal researcher at Microsoft Research New England, and before that an associate professor (with tenure) at Princeton University’s computer science department. Barak has won the Packard and Sloan fellowships, and was also selected for Foreign Policy magazine’s list of 100 leading global thinkers for 2014. He serves on the editorial boards of several journals and is also a member of the Committee for the Advancement of Theoretical Computer Science and of the board of trustees of the Computational Complexity Foundation. He wrote with Sanjeev Arora the textbook “Computational Complexity: A Modern Approach”. As part of the One Harvard Initiative, the sixth annual Lectures That Last (LTL2016) event was organized by the Harvard Graduate and Professional Student Government, with support from the Provost’s Office. LTL2016 was a Harvard-wide lecture series featuring student-nominated faculty speakers from each of the 12 graduate and professional schools who presented short TED-Talk style lectures about their work. This year’s event was held on Saturday, February 6th in Memorial Church (Harvard Yard), with the theme “Crossroads.” For more details and mind-expanding speeches from Harvard professors, visit http://ltl2016.com/.