- Scholarship in 2023 at Georgia Institute of Technology
About Lucien Ng’s work
Lucien Ng is a computer scientist working in the fields of cryptography and cybersecurity. His current research interest is practical secure Multi-Party Computation (MPC), a subfield of cryptography that enables multiple mutually untrusted parties to compute a program without revealing anything more than the result. It is easiest to think of MPC as computation on encrypted data.
MPC serves as a crucial enabler for scenarios where parties wish to contribute their private data to a mutually-beneficial computation, but cannot share it in plaintext because of privacy regulations or IP protection. Recently popularized and driven by decentralized applications, MPC is gaining acceptance more broadly in industry as well, e.g., in online ads and auctions, credit risk analysis, and financial technology. For social welfare, MPC plays an important role for democracy-enhancing technology, e.g., anonymous electronic voting. MPC also enables machine learning to be applied to sensitive financial or medical data and to respond to sensitive queries.
While MPC achieved significant performance breakthroughs in recent years, its applicability is still limited due to high overheads. By improving MPC, Ng’s research aims to make it more useful in critical applications and everyday life.
Biography
Lucien Ng graduated with a BSc in Mathematics and Information Engineering from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2018, followed by an MPhil in Information Engineering at the same institution in 2022. While at the university, he was awarded the following: the 1978 Mathematics Alumnus Li Sze-lim Scholarship, an ELITE Stream Student Scholarship and an Academic Excellence Scholarship from Wu Yee Sun College. In 2018, he also won the Bronze Award of the ASM Technology Award by ASM Pacific Technology Limited. He is currently pursuing his PhD research and studies at the Georgia Institute of Technology.