IEEE Awards Booklet - 2020 - 11

2020 IEEE MEDALS

IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal

IEEE Medal for Innovations in
Healthcare Technology

Sponsored by Qualcomm, Inc.

Sponsored by the IEEE Engineering in
Medicine and Biology Society

Cynthia Dwork

Mark S. Humayun

For foundational work in privacy, cryptography, and distributed computing, and
for leadership in developing differential
privacy

For contributions to the treatments of retinal
neurodegenerative diseases through the use
of prosthetic devices

With a long-standing commitment to applying computer science
research to solve societal problems, Cynthia Dwork has made a
significant impact on addressing hard-to-define and complicated
issues including preserving individual privacy in data analysis and
keeping digital communications secure. Dwork led the development of the foundations of differential privacy and has created
tools that have changed how companies collect and process data.
Prior to differential privacy, protection methods focused on avoiding specific classes of attacks based on previously identified flaws.
However, Dwork saw the need for a definition of privacy that
would be secure against all future attacks while still ensuring that
much of the utility of the statistical data was preserved. Differential
privacy avoids previous shortcomings by understanding the paradoxical nature of privacy where, on one hand, information about
the data should be learned since that is the point of gathering
statistics about the data in the first place, but also assuring that no
additional information will be learned about an individual providing the data. Driven by the objective of giving a mathematical interpretation of this notion of privacy, she formalized what it means
for the information released about a dataset to be nearly independent of whether any single person's record was used. Differential
privacy became the centerpiece for future research in statistical
data privacy and has been deployed by Apple, Google, Microsoft,
and the U.S. Census Bureau. Dwork also helped change the field
of cryptography by creating nonmalleable encryption schemes
where ciphertexts cannot be meaningfully modified without detection, and by creating encryption schemes, based on lattices, for
which randomly chosen instances are as hard to break as the hardest instances. Lattice-based methods have become an indispensable
tool for constructing secure cryptosystems for varied tasks, and
they are the leading technology for postquantum cryptography.
A member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, and
a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and multiple honorary societies, Dwork is the Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science with the Harvard Paulson School of
Engineering at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA, the
Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and Distinguished Scientist at Microsoft Research.

The driving force behind the retinal implant, Mark S. Humayun has profoundly impacted society by enabling partial restoration of sight to the blind, providing to patients with retinitis
pigmentosa the capability to see large objects and letters and to
avoid obstacles. Humayun used his deep knowledge in both the
biomedical and bioengineering fields to develop and lead a consortium of investigators in diverse disciplines to further advance
his efforts in sight restoration and coordinated with researchers in
ophthalmic surgery and retinal physiology and pathology to develop a fully functional, multidisciplinary team. Humayun's pioneering contributions to the field of artificial sight started with
his demonstration that surviving ganglion cells in blind subjects
could be stimulated to elicit vision, despite these subjects having
been blind for decades. Humayun's idea to pursue an epiretinal
version of the artificial retina, controlled by an implanted microchip to "pixelate" digital images acquired by an external camera,
led to the development of a 16-electrode device that effectively
aided several blind patients beyond their expectations (known as
the Argus I). Based on the success of this implant, Humayun led
the development of the Argus II, which contains 60 electrodes
and was found to be both safe and effective in restoring functional vision in a premarket approval clinical trial. The Argus II
is now approved by regulators in the United States, Europe, the
Middle East, and Asia Pacific and has restored vision to hundreds
of patients. He continues to develop artificial retina technology
toward the goals of providing color vision and the ability to read
a smaller font.
An IEEE Fellow and a member of both the U.S. National
Academy of Engineering and U.S. Academy of Medicine, Humayun is the Cornelius J. Pings Chair in Biomedical Sciences and
professor of biomedical engineering and ophthalmology at the
University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA.

Scope: For exceptional contributions to information sciences, systems, and technology.

Scope: For exceptional contributions to technologies and applications benefitting healthcare, medicine, and the health sciences.

11 | 2020 IEEE AWARDS BOOKLET

IEEE Awards Booklet - 2020

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Awards Booklet - 2020