Martín Abadi is a distinguished computer scientist renowned for his pioneering contributions to security, programming languages, and machine learning. Currently serving as a Principal Scientist at Google Research, he has been with the company since November 2014, following previous research positions at Microsoft Research Silicon Valley, DEC, and Bell Labs. A Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he taught until 2013, Abadi earned his PhD in computer science from Stanford University in 1987 under the supervision of Zohar Manna. His international academic influence extends to his appointment as an annual chair holder at the Collège de France, where he contributed significantly to computer science education and research.
Abadi's groundbreaking research has established foundational frameworks across multiple domains of computer science, most notably the Burrows-Abadi-Needham logic for analyzing authentication protocols, developed with Michael Burrows and Roger Needham, which received the prestigious IEEE S&P Test of Time award. His influential book A Theory of Objects, co-authored with Luca Cardelli, laid formal mathematical foundations for object-oriented programming languages, while his development of Baby Modula-3 created a safe subset of Modula-3 based on functional programming principles. In recent years, his work has bridged security and machine learning, particularly through innovations in differential privacy, including his significant contribution to Semi-supervised Knowledge Transfer for Deep Learning from Private Training Data that addresses privacy concerns in neural network training. With over 132,000 citations according to Google Scholar, his research has profoundly shaped both theoretical computer science and practical security implementations worldwide.
As a recognized leader in the field, Abadi has received numerous prestigious honors including the ACM SIGSAC Outstanding Innovation Award and the ACM SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award, reflecting his substantial impact on computer security and systems research. His election as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and membership in the National Academy of Engineering underscore his standing as one of the most influential computer scientists of his generation. Holding a doctorate honoris causa from École normale supérieure Paris-Saclay, Abadi continues to advance the frontiers of secure computing and machine learning at Google, where his current research focuses on developing rigorous frameworks for privacy-preserving artificial intelligence. Through his sustained contributions over decades, Abadi has established himself as a pivotal figure whose work continues to guide both academic research and industrial applications in computer science.
