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April 09, 2010

Seminar on privacy

THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Computer Science and Engineering Division

Presents a CSE DISTINGUISHED LECTURE SEMINAR

Cynthia Dwork, Principal Researcher Microsoft Research

What is Differential Privacy?

SEMINAR

Date: Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Time: 4:00 - 5:00 P.M.
Room: 1690 CSE

ABSTRACT

The problem of statistical disclosure control - revealing accurate statistics about a population while preserving the privacy of individuals - has a venerable history. An extensive literature spans multiple disciplines: statistics, theoretical computer science, security, and databases. Yet privacy breaches abound, both on paper and in practice. This talk describes a large body of work revisiting the problem from the perspective of modern cryptography. We define differential privacy, the first mathematically rigorous and comprehensive notion of privacy tailored to private data analysis. We then present general techniques for achieving differential privacy while simultaneously preserving utility of the data, together with impossibility results that guided its development. Finally, we describe two of the exciting new directions this work has recently taken.

BIO

Cynthia Dwork is a computer scientist at Microsoft Research who works on distributed computing, cryptography and e-mail spam prevention. She received the Dijkstra Prize in 2007 for her work on consensus problems. Dr. Dwork was elected as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) in 2008, and as a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2008. Dr. Dwork received her Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1983.

Posted by kshedden at April 9, 2010 01:35 PM

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