Dwork awarded 2026 Japan Prize

Cynthia Dwork, the Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science on the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), has been awarded the 2026 Japan Prize from her contributions to “leading research for building an ethical digital society, including differential privacy and fairness.”

The Japan Prize is awarded yearly to scientists and engineers from all over the world who “have contributed significantly to the peace and prosperity of humankind through original and outstanding achievements that have greatly advanced the progress of science and technology.” Every 12 months, two scientific fields are chosen for the award. This 12 months, the 2 fields eligible for the award have been Life Sciences and Electronics, Information, and Communication, for which Dwork was awarded. 

Dwork is a pioneer of differential privateness, a powerful privateness assure and a group of strategies that enable researchers to investigate massive knowledge units containing delicate private info – resembling medical and mortgage software data – whereas preserving the privateness of the people whose info is contained therein. The mathematical method she and colleagues first pioneered within the mid-2000s is now broadly deployed in trade and was the spine of the Disclosure Avoidance System for the 2020 U.S. Census, which allowed the evaluation of respondents’ knowledge whereas sustaining strict privateness pointers.

More than a decade earlier than her landmark work on differential privateness, Dwork labored to unravel a special drawback — the rising tide of spam emails. In 1993, she proposed a brand new system, often called “proof of work,” which provides a small quantity of computational effort to duties like sending an e mail. This computational effort doesn’t impression odd customers however provides up, making it too computationally costly to ship tens of millions of emails without delay. 

The “proof of work” concept was later adopted in blockchain and at this time varieties the idea of cryptocurrencies. In Bitcoin, a consumer pays a computational value so as to add a block of transactions to the chain, making the system safer — since dishonest and large-scale assaults grow to be prohibitively costly — and extra democratic. 

More lately,  Dwork and collaborators have been centered on the theoretical investigation of algorithmic equity, a discipline now experiencing explosive development.

In the award quotation, The Japan Prize Foundation wrote: “Dwork’s research presents definitive, mathematical solutions to the critical challenges facing our digital society now and in the future, thereby bridging theory and practice and establishing a strong foundation for both academic research and society itself.”

The award ceremony shall be in April and shall be attended by the reigning Emperor and Empress, in accordance with the The Japan Prize Foundation.  

In 2024, Dwork was awarded the National Medal of Science. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering, and is a fellow of the ACM, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. She has acquired a number of awards in 4 completely different fields, together with the 30-Year Test-of-Time Award on the 2022 ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, in cryptography; and the 2007 Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize, in distributed computing. Her Ph.D. in pc science is from Cornell University.