Yael Tauman Kalai (Hebrew: יעל טאומן קלעי) is a codebreaker and scientist who studies computer theory. She is the Ellen Swallow Richards Professor at MIT in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. Before that, she worked as a senior researcher at Microsoft Research New England.

Education and career

Kalai graduated from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1997. She got a master's degree from the Weizmann Institute of Science in 2001, working with Adi Shamir. She completed a PhD at MIT in 2006, advised by Shafi Goldwasser. After doing postdoctoral research at Microsoft Research and the Weizmann Institute, she became a faculty member at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She took a permanent job at Microsoft Research in 2008 and became a professor at MIT in 2024. She serves on the Scientific Advisory Board for the Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics (ICERM).

Contributions

Kalai helped create ring signatures, which are now an important part of many systems, including Cryptonote and Monero (cryptocurrency). Later, she worked with her advisor Shafi Goldwasser to show a weakness in the commonly used Fiat–Shamir heuristic. Her research on delegating computation is used in cloud computing.

Recognition

Kalai spoke about math topics related to computer science at the 2018 International Congress of Mathematicians.

Her master's thesis, which developed a method called ring signatures, received an award for outstanding master's thesis. Her PhD dissertation from MIT won the George M. Sprowls Award for Outstanding PhD Thesis in Computer Science.

In 2017, she was co-chair of the Theory of Cryptography Conference.

In 2022, she was given the ACM Prize in Computing for creating new ways to check if computer tasks are done correctly and for important work in cryptography.

Personal

Kalai is the daughter of Yair Tauman, a game theorist. Her husband, Adam Tauman Kalai, works at OpenAI.