Boaz Barak (Hebrew: בועז ברק), who was born in 1974, is a professor of computer science at Harvard University. He is also a technical staff member at OpenAI.
Early life and education
He graduated in 1999 with a B.Sc. in mathematics and computer science from Tel Aviv University. In 2004, he earned his Ph.D. from the Weizmann Institute of Science. His thesis was titled "Non-Black-Box Techniques in Cryptography," and he was supervised by Oded Goldreich. He worked at the Institute for Advanced Study from 2003 to 2005. From 2005 to 2010, he was an assistant professor in the computer science department at Princeton University. He became an associate professor there from 2010 to 2011. From 2010 to 2016, he worked as a researcher at Microsoft's New England research laboratory. Since 2016, he has been the Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He is a citizen of both Israel and the United States.
Career
He co-authored Computational Complexity: A Modern Approach with Sanjeev Arora, which was published by Cambridge University Press in 2009. Barak also wrote detailed notes with David Steurer about the sum of squares algorithm and sometimes writes blog posts on the Windows on Theory blog. In 2013, he worked with Robert J. Goldston and Alexander Glaser to create a "zero-knowledge" system to confirm whether warheads meant for disarmament are real. By sending high-energy neutrons into the warhead being checked and comparing how the neutrons spread through it to how they spread through a known warhead, inspectors can determine if the warhead is genuine or a fake meant to avoid treaty rules, without revealing nuclear secrets. For this work, he was named one of Foreign Policy’s Top 100 Global Thinkers in 2014.
In 2014, Barak spoke at the International Congress of Mathematics in Seoul. In 2016, he, along with Mark Braverman, Xi Chen, and Anup Rao, received the SIAM Outstanding Paper Prize for their paper titled “How to Compress Interactive Communication.” In 2022, he was named an ACM Fellow for contributions to theoretical computer science, especially in cryptography and computational complexity, and for his service to the theory community. In January 2024, Barak joined OpenAI as a Member of Technical Staff on their alignment team.
Patents
U.S. Patent 7,003,677, “Method for running secure applications on an unsafe system,” was created by Amir Herzberg, Dalit Naor, and Eldad Shai of IBM Haifa Research Lab. The patent was submitted in November 1999 and officially approved in February 2006.