Alexander R. Block

Email: alexander [dot] r [dot] block [at] gmail [dot] com
Georgetown Email: alexander [dot] block [at] georgetown [dot] edu
UMD Email: arblock [at] umd [dot] edu
CV (Last Updated: December 05, 2022)

About

I am a joint Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Maryland, College Park and Georgetown University under the guidance of Professor Jonathan Katz and Professor Justin Thaler. I recently received my PhD in Computer Science from Purdue University and was extremely fortunate to be advised by Professor Jeremiah Blocki. My broad research interests are in Theoretical Cryptography, Efficient Proof/Argument Systems, and Coding Theory.

I was a Graduate Fellow during the Summer of 2019 at the Reichman University (IDC Herzliya) FACT Center under the guidence of Alon Rosen.

I received my M.Sc. in Computer Science from Purdue University in 2019. Prior to that, I received a B.S. in both Mathematics (Hons.) and Information & Computer Science (Hons.) from the University of California, Irvine, and graduated with Campuswide Honors from the Campuswide Honors Collegium (formerly known as the Campuswide Honors Program).

Papers

All authors are listed in alphabetical order by last name. More recent papers appear first.

Preprints
  1. Honest Majority Multi-Prover Interactive Arguments
    Alexander R. Block, Christina Garman
    Cryptology ePrint Archive: [pdf]
Conference Publications
  1. On Relaxed Locally Decodable Codes for Hamming and Insertion-Deletion Errors
    Alexander R. Block, Jeremiah Blocki, Kuan Cheng, Elena Grigorescu, Xin Li, Yu Zheng, Minshen Zhu
    in CCC 2023 [pdf]

  2. Computationally Relaxed Locally Decodable Codes, Revisited
    Alexander R. Block, Jeremiah Blocki
    in ISIT 2023 [pdf]

  3. Memory-Hard Puzzles in the Standard Model with Applications to Memory-Hard Functions and Resource-Bounded Locally Decodable Codes
    Mohammad Hassan Ameri, Alexander R. Block, Jeremiah Blocki
    in SCN 2022 [pdf] [doi]

  4. Time- and Space-Efficient Arguments from Groups of Unknown Order
    Alexander R. Block, Justin Holmgren, Alon Rosen, Ron D. Rothblum, Pratik Soni
    in CRYPTO 2021 [pdf] [talk] [doi]

  5. $P_4$-free Partition and Cover Numbers and Applications
    Alexander R. Block, Simina Brânzei, Hemanta K. Maji, Himanshi Mehta, Tamalika Mukherjee, Hai H. Nguyen
    in ITC 2021 [pdf] [talk] [doi]

  6. Private and Resource-Bounded Locally Decodable Codes for Insertions and Deletions
    Alexander R. Block, Jeremiah Blocki
    in ISIT 2021 [pdf] [doi]

  7. Locally Decodable/Correctable Codes for Insertions and Deletions
    Alexander R. Block, Jeremiah Blocki, Elena Grigorescu, Shubhang Kulkarni, Minshen Zhu
    in FSTTCS 2020 [pdf] [talk] [doi]

  8. Public-Coin Zero-Knowledge Arguments with (almost) Minimal Time and Space Overheads
    Alexander R. Block, Justin Holmgren, Alon Rosen, Ron D. Rothblum, Pratik Soni
    in TCC 2020 [pdf] [talk] [doi]

  9. Secure Computation with Constant Communication Overhead using Multiplication Embeddings
    Alexander R. Block, Hemanta K. Maji, Hai H. Nguyen
    in INDOCRYPT 2018 [pdf] [doi]

  10. Secure Computation using Leaky Correlations (Asymptotically Optimal Constructions)
    Alexander R. Block, Divya Gupta, Hemanta K. Maji, Hai H. Nguyen
    in TCC 2018 [pdf] [doi]

  11. Secure Computation based on Leaky Correlations: High Resilience Setting
    Alexander R. Block, Hemanta K. Maji, Hai H. Nguyen
    in CRYPTO 2017 [pdf] [talk] [doi]
Honors Research Thesis

Academic and Scientific Service

Program Committees
Conference Reviews
Journal Reviews
Academic Organization Positions

Awards

Teaching

Graduate Teaching Assistant Positions at Purdue University

Last updated on 5/4/2023, 1:13:00 PM EDT.
This site uses NGINX and is built using Handlebars, Sass, and Skeleton Sass.
© 2021 Alexander R. Block