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Boaz Barak's photo Boaz Barak
(In Hebrew: בועז ברק)
Senior Researcher, Microsoft Research New England

Maling address: Boaz Barak,Microsoft, 1 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA 02140
Phone: (857) 453-6000 (I prefer email), Fax: (857) 453-6063 (please indicate my name)
News:

About me: I joined Microsoft in the summer of 2010. Previously I was an assistant and associate professor at the Princeton University's Computer Science department, and before that a member in the School of Math at the Institute for Advanced Study. I have a Ph.D from the Weizmann Institute of Science.  I was/am on the program committees for STOC 2004, TCC 2005, CRYPTO 2005 , RANDOM 2005, CRYPTO 2006 , TCC 2008, CSR 2008, CRYPTO 2008, FOCS 2009, TCC 2011 and CCC 2012 conferences. I was co-organizer of the workshop on Complexity and Cryptography: Status of Impagliazzo's Worlds, and was a local organizer for Women In Theory 2008 and Women In Theory 2010 workshops. I am on the board of editors of the Theory of Computing Journal (ToC) and on the scientific board of the Electronic Colloquium of Computational Complexity. I am a PI in the Center for Computational Intractability.  Former  students: Sharon Goldberg (graduated, co advised with Jennifer Rexford), David Xiao (graduated, co advised with Avi Wigderson), Mohammad Mahmoody, Moritz Hardt. Former postdocs: Benny Applebaum, Thomas Holenstein, Guy Rothblum.
See also my curicculum vitae and web pages for courses I have taught.

Selected papers (see also full list of publications)


S. Arora, B. Barak, and D. Steurer. Subexponential Algorithms for Unique Games and Related problems . In Proc. of FOCS, 2010.
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B. Applebaum, B. Barak, and A. Wigderson. Public Key Cryptography from Different Assumptions . In Proc. of STOC, 2010. Preliminary version as cryptology eprint report 2008/335 by Barak and Wigderson, http://eprint.iacr.org/2008/335.
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B. Barak, M. Braverman, X. Chen, and A. Rao. How to compress interactive communication . In Proc. STOC, 2010.
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S. Arora, B. Barak, M. Brunnermeier, and R. Ge. Computational Complexity and Information Asymmetry in Financial Products . In Innovations in Computer Science (ICS) conference, 2010.
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B. Barak and M. Mahmoody-Ghidary. Merkle Puzzles are Optimal - an O(n2) attack on key exchange from a random oracle . In Proceedings of CRYPTO '09, 2009.
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S. Goldberg, D. Xiao, E. Tromer, B. Barak, and J. Rexford. Path-Quality Monitoring in the Presence of Adversaries . In Proceedings of SIGMETRICS 2008, 2008.
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B. Barak, A. Rao, R. Shaltiel, and A. Wigderson. 2-source dispersers for sub-polynomial entropy and Ramsey graphs beating the Frankl-Wilson construction . In Proc. 38th Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC), pages 671-680. ACM, 2006.
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B. Barak, R. Impagliazzo, and A. Wigderson. Extracting Randomness Using Few Independent Sources . SIAM Journal on Computing, 36(4):1095-1118, 2006. Preliminary version in FOCS' 04.
[ bib | powerpoint | .ps | .pdf ]

B. Barak and A. Sahai. How to Play Almost Any Mental Game Over the Net - Concurrent Composition Using Super-Polynomial Simulation . In Proc. 46th FOCS. IEEE, 2005.
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B. Barak. A Probabilistic-Time Hierarchy Theorem for ``Slightly Non-Uniform'' Algorithms . In Proc. of 6th Workshop on Randomization and Approximation Techniques in Computer Science (RANDOM), 2002.
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B. Barak. Constant-Round Coin-Tossing With a Man in the Middle or Realizing the Shared Random String Model . In Proc. 43rd FOCS. IEEE, 2002.
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B. Barak. How to go beyond the black-box simulation barrier . In Proc. 42nd FOCS, pages 106-115. IEEE, 2001.
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B. Barak, O. Goldreich, R. Impagliazzo, S. Rudich, A. Sahay, S. Vadhan, and K. Yang. On the (Im)possibility of Obfuscating Programs . In Crypto '01, pages 1-18, 2001. LNCS No. 2139.
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