Events Calendar

CS Colloquium: Kobbi Nissim (Harvard University) - Privacy: From Theory to Practice

Speaker: Kobbi Nissim, Dept. of Computer Science, Ben-Gurion University and Center for Research on Computation and Society, Harvard University

Talk Title: Privacy: From Theory to Practice

Series: CS Colloquium

Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium

The treatment of privacy in data analysis has taken a dramatic shift a little more than a decade ago - as failures of traditional privacy preserving techniques were beginning to accumulate, a theoretical, foundational approach to privacy emerged. A central concept in this theoretical treatment is "differential privacy", a definition of privacy in the context of data analysis that has concrete provable privacy consequences. Differential privacy became to be a rich, fast evolving framework for developing privacy preserving algorithms and for studying some of the fundamental properties of privacy. Moreover, differential privacy proved to interact fruitfully with many other research areas, and even to influence applications that are (seemingly) not related to privacy. With a mature theoretical basis, differential privacy is now at prime time for inclusion in real-world systems.

We will look into the intuition behind differential privacy, review some of is theory, and some of the challenges towards using differential privacy in practice. In particular, we will focus on a new legal-technological methodology for making rigorous claims that differential privacy satisfies existing legal privacy regulations.

The talk would be self-contained and no prior background on privacy would be assumed.

Host: CS Department

Location: Olin Hall of Engineering (OHE) - 136

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Assistant to CS chair