Cryptography, Encryption, and Big Data

We live in an era of "Big Data", wherein a deluge of data is being generated, collected, and stored all around us. In order to protect this data, we need to encrypt it. This raises a fundamentally new challenge in cryptography: Can we encrypt data while enabling fine-grained access control and selective computation, as is necessary to protect big, complex data? In this talk, I will present my work on functional encryption which addresses this challenge, using mostly pictures, some basic math, and perhaps a few equations.