Alessandro Chiesa is a faculty member in computer science. He conducts research in complexity theory, cryptography, and security, with a focus on the theoretical foundations and practical implementations of cryptographic proofs that are short and easy to verify. He is a co-author of several zkSNARK libraries, and is a co-inventor of the Zerocash protocol. He has co-founded Zcash and StarkWare Industries. He is a recipient of an IEEE SP Test-of-Time Award (2024), Sloan Research Fellowship (2021), an Okawa Foundation Research Grant (2020), and Google Faculty Research Awards (2018 and 2017). He was included in MIT Technology Review's "35 Innovators Under 35" list in 2018.

The discovery and study of probabilistic proof systems, such as PCPs and IPs, have had a tremendous impact on theoretical computer science. These proof systems have numerous applications (e.g., to hardness of approximation) but one of their most compelling uses is a direct one: to construct cryptographic protocols that enable super fast verification of long computations. This course introduces students to the foundations of probabilistic proof systems, covering both classical results as well as modern efficient constructions. The playlist of video lectures is here and the syllabus is here.