Dr. Man Ho Allen Au is an associate professor of the Department of Computer Science in the University of Hong Kong (HKU). He received his BEng and MPhil degrees from the Department of Information Engineering of the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2003 and 2005 respectively. He then obtained his PhD from the School of Computer Science and Software Engineering of the University of Wollongong in 2009.  Priori to joining HKU, he was an associate professor in the Department of Computing of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. His research interests include applied cryptography, information security, blockchain technology, and related industrial applications. Dr. Au haspublished over 160 refereed papers in top journals and conferences, including CRYPTO, ASIACRYPT, ACM CCS, ACM SIGMOD, NDSS, IEEE TIFS, TC, TKDE, etc.  He is a recipient of the 2009 PET runner-up award for outstanding research in privacy enhancing technologies.

Dr. Au’s research has generated significant social and economic impact. In the past 5 years, he has, as the principal investigator, attracted over 25 million HKD in research and high-level consultancy projects. His digital signature technology has been adopted by the Hyperledger Fabric project, the most popular blockchain infrastructure supported by big industry players like IBM, Intel and SAP. His analysis on privacy, and design of new privacy-preserving techniques for confidential transactions, has been discussed and reported by leading privacy-friendly currencies such as Monero. Dr. Au is also an expert member of the China delegation of ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 27 working group 2 - Cryptography and security mechanisms and a committee member of the Hong Kong Blockchain Society R&D division.