StarZero All shows Try the podcast clipper →

Kurt Rohloff

Co-Founder and CTO, Duality Technologies · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

founderexecutiveacademicscientistweb.njit.edu/~rohloff ↗

Kurt Rohloff is a pioneer in practical fully homomorphic encryption who co-founded the open-source cryptography libraries PALISADE and OpenFHE. In 2016, he co-founded Duality Technologies to enable privacy-preserving data collaboration and analytics on encrypted data.

16statements → 8claims → 5claims resolved → 80%fully supported → 4/5average certainty → 1.5/5average debate potential →

4 supported 1 partly supported 0 contradicted 3 not checkable as stated how the 8 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

1 prediction · 7 assertions · 2 insights · 6 disclosures · every statement was checked. The prediction and assertions are the 8 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 5 are resolved, and 3 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Kurt argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
Duality's co-founders include two MIT professors and a Turing Award winner
“And, ah, our, actually our co-founders include two MIT professors, including a Turing award winner.”
Kurt Rohloff Oct 22, 2019 ▶ 3:11 Computing On Encrypted Data // Kurt Rohloff, Duality (Firstmark's Data Driven NYC)

How they sound: speaking style how? →

255 words/min while actually speaking · 44.3 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Kurt Rohloff: only 1 usable question→answer exchange on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews.

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 3,544 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

Everything Kurt Rohloff said on the MAD Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Disclosure
Duality runs sub-second genome-wide association studies on encrypted NIH data
“We're actually at a point now where we're actually encrypting genomic data for NIH and running full-on genome-wide association studies on encrypted genomic data with, ah, sub-second response times.”
Kurt Rohloff Oct 22, 2019 ▶ 5:51 Computing On Encrypted Data // Kurt Rohloff, Duality (Firstmark's Data Driven NYC)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Differential privacy fails on fine-grained analysis like genome-wide association studies
“The challenge with that, it actually doesn't work very well if you need really fine-grained analysis as you would, for example genome-wide association studies.”
Kurt Rohloff Oct 22, 2019 ▶ 15:37 Computing On Encrypted Data // Kurt Rohloff, Duality (Firstmark's Data Driven NYC)
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Homomorphic encryption is on the cusp of solving major privacy issues
“And the core technology that we have is something that's called homomorph encryption and it's been growing in, in many different spaces and a diff, couple different areas, but it's enabling and on the cusp of addressing all these very, kind of, serious issues …”
Kurt Rohloff Oct 22, 2019 ▶ 2:25 Computing On Encrypted Data // Kurt Rohloff, Duality (Firstmark's Data Driven NYC)
Insight
Lattice cryptography adoption is hindered by its unique compute model
“One of the reasons that so many, so few people have been able to actually use this technology so far is that it's a very, very different compute model.”
Kurt Rohloff Oct 22, 2019 ▶ 6:25 Computing On Encrypted Data // Kurt Rohloff, Duality (Firstmark's Data Driven NYC)
Disclosure
Duality Technologies is fundamentally a data science company, not just security
“Though ostensibly duality technologies is really about security and cryptography, we're actually very much heart and soul at, a data science company, and how we can enable analytics on data that is protected and sensitive.”
Kurt Rohloff Oct 22, 2019 ▶ 1:18 Computing On Encrypted Data // Kurt Rohloff, Duality (Firstmark's Data Driven NYC)
Disclosure
Duality's encrypted computing tech originated from academic, DARPA, and DoD research
“So our solution is that we have a set of techniques that's, ah, been coming out of academia, out of DARPA, the DoD, where I personally came out of, and, ah, to enable computing on data while it's encrypted.”
Kurt Rohloff Oct 22, 2019 ▶ 1:59 Computing On Encrypted Data // Kurt Rohloff, Duality (Firstmark's Data Driven NYC)
Assertion Supported
Duality's co-founders include two MIT professors and a Turing Award winner
“And, ah, our, actually our co-founders include two MIT professors, including a Turing award winner.”
Kurt Rohloff Oct 22, 2019 ▶ 3:11 Computing On Encrypted Data // Kurt Rohloff, Duality (Firstmark's Data Driven NYC)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Traditional approaches to data security treat privacy and utility as zero-sum
“Generally there's been kind of like this all or nothing kind of approach, a zero sum game of providing a lot of privacy or providing a lot of utility from data, driving a lot of value.”
Kurt Rohloff Oct 22, 2019 ▶ 3:57 Computing On Encrypted Data // Kurt Rohloff, Duality (Firstmark's Data Driven NYC)
Assertion Partly supported
In 2009, an encrypted bitwise AND operation took half an hour
“Whereas in, in the old days, it would take, for example, you know, when the homework for crypto was first discovered, it basically took a half hour to run a bitwise AND on encrypted data.”
Kurt Rohloff Oct 22, 2019 ▶ 5:21 Computing On Encrypted Data // Kurt Rohloff, Duality (Firstmark's Data Driven NYC)
Assertion Supported
Lattice cryptography is a leading candidate for NIST's post-quantum standard
“It's one of the leading candidates for the NIST's, ah, ah, public key standard coming forward for the post-quantum, post-quantum crypto.”
Kurt Rohloff Oct 22, 2019 ▶ 6:17 Computing On Encrypted Data // Kurt Rohloff, Duality (Firstmark's Data Driven NYC)
Disclosure
Duality open-sources its core homomorphic encryption and key generation operations
“We make all our, ah, crypto technology, the core crypto operations of key generation, encryption, decryption, everything else, open source.”
Kurt Rohloff Oct 22, 2019 ▶ 9:02 Computing On Encrypted Data // Kurt Rohloff, Duality (Firstmark's Data Driven NYC)
Insight
The best software engineers are lazy, designing modular and reusable systems
“The best software engineers are as lazy as possible, meaning they make things as modular as possible, and reusable as possible”
Kurt Rohloff Oct 22, 2019 ▶ 11:07 Computing On Encrypted Data // Kurt Rohloff, Duality (Firstmark's Data Driven NYC)
Disclosure
Duality enables encrypted anti-money laundering with the UK Metropolitan Police
“You know, another use case that we've actually had is that we're actually enabling anti-money laundering and fraud detection over encrypted data particularly as enabled by Duality Technologies running in collaboration with the CDA, a consortium of British bank…”
Kurt Rohloff Oct 22, 2019 ▶ 14:12 Computing On Encrypted Data // Kurt Rohloff, Duality (Firstmark's Data Driven NYC)
Assertion Supported
The US Census Bureau is piloting internal data privacy technologies
“I have personally talked with the, ah, head of data innovation of the Census Bureau, and I know they, they're actually running a pilot study with, ah, a different set of technologies with internal development right now.”
Kurt Rohloff Oct 22, 2019 ▶ 19:03 Computing On Encrypted Data // Kurt Rohloff, Duality (Firstmark's Data Driven NYC)
Disclosure
Duality protects the underlying data, not the insights derived from it
“We at Duality do not, for example, protect the insights after they're obtained. We protect the data that's used to derive those insights.”
Kurt Rohloff Oct 22, 2019 ▶ 19:48 Computing On Encrypted Data // Kurt Rohloff, Duality (Firstmark's Data Driven NYC)
Assertion Supported
Kurt Rohloff developed the PALISADE cryptographic library over a decade with DARPA
“I personally have been working on it for a good 10 years or so primarily with support of DARPA and the other ARPAs in collaboration with folks at MIT and a number of defense contractors”
Kurt Rohloff Oct 22, 2019 ▶ 11:26 Computing On Encrypted Data // Kurt Rohloff, Duality (Firstmark's Data Driven NYC)

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
Computing On Encrypted Data // Kurt Rohloff, Duality (Firstmark's Data Driven NYC) Oct 22, 2019 17m
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 400 conversations transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.

Try the podcast clipper Learn more