Women in Science

Prof. Arpita Patra is presently an Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science & Automation, IISc. Her group specializes on cryptography and information security.  Within Cryptography, their primary focus is on the topic of secure multi-party computation (aka. MPC), which is arguably known as the standard-bearer problem and the holy grail in Cryptography. MPC allows a set of distrusting parties to jointly perform a collaborative computation on their private inputs in a way that no coalition of cheating parties can learn more information than the intended outputs.

Today her work pushes the frontiers of both theory and practice of Cryptography alike. On one hand, her works in theoretical foundation of cryptography have made striking progress on fundamental and classic questions on round and communication complexity of secure multi party computation, that were left open for more than three decades. On the other hand, her applied works in MPC have produced privacy-preserving solutions for various problems in domains such as social-relevance (allegation escrow), Health (medical diagnostics using ML, genome-matching), FinTech (fraud-detection, dark-pools, liquidity-matching), Smart-cities (traffic-control, ride-sharing, recommendation-systems, drones), which may have high commercial value. Her joint effort in systemization-of-knowledge  with her research collaborator Ashish Choudhury,  led to the publication of a monogram entitled “Secure Multiparty Computation against Passive Adversaries” with Springer.