Seny Kamara
Seny Kamara | |
|---|---|
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | |
| Awards | |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Computer science, cryptography |
| Institutions | |
| Doctoral advisor | Fabian Monrose |
| Doctoral students | |
Seny Kamara is an American computer scientist best known for his work on cryptography. He has delivered multiple congressional testimonies about the potential harms and opportunities with technology. He leads or co-leads numerous centers and activities focused on cryptography and social good. His work has been covered extensively in high profile media including Wired and Forbes.
Education
Kamara received his Bachelors in Computer Science from Purdue University in 2001. He received his Masters and PhD in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University in 2008. His dissertation, Computing Securely with Untrusted Resources, explored security problems in settings where honest parties make use of computational resources that are under adversarial control.
Career
He is an [Associate Professor]] of Computer Science at Brown University. He has worked as a Chief Scientist at Aroki Systems, as a Principal Scientist at MongoDB, and as a researcher at Microsoft Research. At Brown University, he co-directs the Encrypted Systems Lab and is affiliated with the CAPS group, the Data Science Initiative, the Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies and the Policy Lab. He teaches a popular Algorithms for the People course that surveys, critiques, and aspires to address the ways in which computer science & technology affect marginalized communities.
He has over 10,000 citations according to Google Scholar. In his Invited Keynote for Crypto 2020, a top conference in the field of cryptography, he gave a high profile talk, which has over 11,000 views, about how computing can harm marginalized communities and about the potential of cryptography, and security fields more broadly, to protect users and communities.
Kamara has given congressional testimony to the U.S. House Committee on Space, Science and Technology in 2021 where he argued for considering the harms technology can cause and advocated for computer science and technology communities to work hard to mitigate those harms. Also in 2021, he collaborated with Senator Ron Wyden to advocate for an encrypted gun registry. In 2019, he delivered congressional testimony to the Financial Services Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives about how data uses in the financial industry have the potential to erode consumer privacy and increase discrimination. His work has been covered extensively in Wired, ArsTechnica, Forbes, BoingBoing, and elsewhere.