[Colloq] Title: Privacy: From Theory to Practice | Speaker: Kobbi Nissim, Ben-Gurion University and Center for Research on Computation and Society, Harvard University | Date: 4/19/16 Time: 1:30-2:30pm Location: 366 WVH

[Walker, Lashauna]

Title: Privacy: From Theory to Practice
Speaker: Kobbi Nissim, Ben-Gurion University and Center for Research on Computation and Society, Harvard University
Date: 4/19/16   Time: 1:30-2:30pm  Location: 366 WVH



Title: Privacy: From Theory to Practice

Abstract:
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 implications. 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 the question whether differential privacy satisfies existing privacy regulations and present a new methodology for making rigorous claims that this is the case.

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

Bio:
Kobbi Nissim is a Professor of Computer Science at Ben-Gurion University and a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Research on Computation and Society at Harvard.

Kobbi's current work is focused on the mathematical formulation and understanding of privacy. His work from 2003 and 2004 with Dinur and Dwork initiated rigorous foundational research of privacy and presented a precursor of Differential Privacy, a strong definition of privacy in computation that he introduced in 2006 with Dwork, McSherry and Smith. With collaborators, Nissim established some of the basic constructions supporting differential privacy, and studied differential privacy in various contexts, including statistics, computational learning, mechanism design, and social networks. Since 2011, Kobbi has contributed as a senior researcher to the Privacy Tools for Sharing Research Data project at Harvard. Other contributions of Nissim include the BGN homomorphic encryption scheme with Boneh and Goh, and the research of private approximations.

In 2013, Nissim received with Irit Dinur the Alberto O. Mendelzon Test-of-Time award for their PODS 2003 work initiating the rigorous study of privacy. In 2016 he received with Cynthia Dwork, Frank McSherry, and Adam Smith the TCC Test-of-time award for their TCC 2006 work presenting differential privacy.



Thank You.

LaShauna Walker
Events and Administrative Specialist
College of Computer and Information Science
Northeastern University
617-373-2763
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