Antigoni Polychroniadou, Ph.D.

Antigoni Polychroniadou is a postdoctoral researcher in the Computer Science Department at Cornell University, hosted by Rafael Pass and Elaine Shi. She completed her Ph.D. at Aarhus University under the supervision of Ivan Damgård and holds an M.S. in mathematics of cryptography and communications from Royal Holloway University of London, supervised by Kenny Paterson. She interned at IDC Herzliya hosted by Alon Rosen; the Technion hosted by Yuval Ishai; University of California, Berkeley, hosted by Sanjam Garg; and IBM Research Thomas J. Watson Research Center hosted by Tal Rabin and was a short-term postdoctoral fellow at Rochester University hosted by Muthu Venkitasubramaniam. Polychroniadou explores one of the core questions in cryptography: How quickly can secure computation be performed? She identified efficiency limitations and constructed protocols with strict security guarantees and optimal complexities, measured in rounds of interaction, number of communicated bits and computational overhead. Her current focus is on the design of secure computation protocols that allow distributed computer systems to perform complex computations on confidential data while preserving the privacy of the information. Applications of such systems include distributed ledgers as in blockchain technologies, HIPAA-compliant medical or genomic-data mining and machine learning on encrypted data.