Date: Wednesday, October 25;   4:00 - 5:00p

Location: 301 College Ave, Seminar Room

Note: 3:30 - 4:00p will be our social gathering with refreshments at 301 College Ave.

Abstract:

The digitization of our daily lives has led to an explosion in the collection of data by governments, corporations, and individuals. Protection of confidentiality of this data is of utmost importance. However, knowledge of statistical properties of private data can have significant societal benefits; for example, in decisions about the allocation of public funds based on Census data, or in the analysis of medical data from different hospitals to understand the interaction of drugs. Gehrke will start his talk by introducing two application scenarios: privacy-preserving data analysis and privacy-preserving data publishing. He will then show how, in simple models, background knowledge can lead to severe breaches of privacy in both applications, and he will describe how proper modeling of background knowledge can avoid privacy breaches. He will outline algorithmic steps towards privacy-preserving data analysis and data publishing with background knowledge, and conclude with open problems.

Bio:

Johannes Gehrke is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University and an Associate Director of the Cornell Theory Center. Johannes' research interests are in the areas of data mining, search, data privacy, and applications of database and data mining technology to marketing and the sciences. He has received a National Science Foundation Career Award, an Arthur P. Sloan Fellowship, an IBM Faculty Award, the Cornell College of Engineering James and Mary Tien Excellence in Teaching Award, and the Cornell University Provost’s Award for Distinguished Scholarship. He is the author of numerous publications on data mining and database systems, and he co-authored the undergraduate textbook Database Management Systems (McGrawHill (2002), currently in its third edition), used at universities all over the world.

For more information, please contact Claire Cardie.

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10-17-06 Rosemary