Silvio Micali (born October 13, 1954) is an Italian computer scientist, professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the founder of Algorand. Micali's research centers on cryptography and information security. In 2012, he received the Turing Award for his work in cryptography.
Micali graduated in mathematics at La Sapienza University of Rome in 1978 and earned a Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1982; for research supervised by Manuel Blum. Micali has been on the faculty at MIT, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department, since 1983. His research interests are cryptography, zero knowledge, pseudorandom generation, secure protocols, and mechanism design.
Micali is best known for some of his fundamental early work on public-key cryptosystems, pseudorandom functions, digital signatures, oblivious transfer, secure multiparty computation, and is one of the co-inventors of zero-knowledge proofs.
