Marina Blanton recognized as ACM distinguished member

By Elizabeth Egan 

The ACM named 56 distinguished members in the class of 2024, honoring inductees who have made advancements in autonomous vehicles, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, mobile networks, software and numerous other areas. According to ACM, distinguished members have made significant achievements in computing beyond the norm.

The inductees are registered members of the society who were selected by their peers to honor significant technical achievements and volunteer service to their professional community.

“I am honored to be joining a selective group of individuals recognized as accomplished researchers and top professionals in the field of computing,” said Blanton.

The ACM Distinguished Members program honors up to 10 percent of the society’s membership, based on professional experience and contributions to the field of computing. To be nominated, candidates must have 15 years of professional experience in the field and have been an ACM member for the prior 10 years.

Blanton is recognized for her contributions to the advancement of privacy-preserving computation.

“It is notable how far we've come in our ability to securely compute on private data,” noted Blanton.

Blanton and her team have designed and implemented a compiler for privacy-preserving computation.

“The compiler transforms a program designed to compute on private data into a distributed implementation that securely evaluates the computation on private inputs,” continued Blanton.

Blanton said that the compiler, referred to as PICCO, comes with a suite of additional tools. PICCO serves as a research experimentation tool that allows a person to quickly synthesize secure protocols for different functionalities, a tool for teaching secure computation to students, and a toolkit for running secure computation in practice on private data obtained from multiple sources.

“CSE is proud to congratulate Marina on this prestigious designation from the ACM,” said David Doermann, chair of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. “This honor provides an overdue recognition for Marina’s contributions to advancements in privacy-preserving research.”

In 2021, Blanton became the faculty director of UB’s Women in Science and Engineering, a program that plays a significant role in attracting women to STEM degree programs at UB. She is also a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. In 2019, Blanton received a highly competitive Google Faculty Research award for her work on improving the efficiency of privacy-preserving computation.

Her research interests include applied cryptography, information security, privacy-preserving computation and outsourcing.

Blanton earned a PhD and master’s degree in computer science from Purdue University, a master’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science from Ohio University, and her bachelor’s in computer science from Tyumen State Oil and Gas University in Russia.