[Colloquium] Rafail Ostrovsky, Telcordia Technologies - Monday, April 21, 2003

[Margery Ishmael]

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DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE - TALK

Monday, April 21, 2003 at 2:30 pm in Ryerson 251

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Speaker: Rafail Ostrovsky
From: Telcordia Technologies
url: http://www.telcordia.com/research/whoweare/staff/rafail.html

Title: Data-Mining with Privacy

Abstract
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How do you collect data from a public dataset yet preserve individual
privacy? How do you store private information in a remote database in a
privacy-preserving manner? What does it mean formally and how do you model
it? In this talk, I'll survey several cryptographic techniques addressing
these fundamental issues. In particular, I'll describe privacy-preserving
searching of publicly available data (including Private Information
Retrieval) and searching/storing private data in a remote database. I'll
also discuss approximate searching, including some recent techniques for
privacy-preserving approximate nearest-neighbor search in high-dimensional
spaces. The talk will be self-contained and accessible to the general
audience.

Bio
===
Dr. Ostrovsky received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from M.I.T. in 1992,
where his thesis resolved a major open problem in the theoretical
foundations of Software Protection. He was awarded NSF Postdoctoral
Fellowship that he conducted at U.C. Berkeley until 1995, when he joined
Bell Communications Research (Bellcore, later renamed into Telcordia
Technologies.)

Dr. Ostrovsky research interests are in the areas of Cryptography and
Distributed Algorithms, with a primary focus in Cryptography with over 70
published papers and over 10 patents. Dr. Ostrovsky is a winner of 1993
Henry H. Taub Prize for his work in Zero-Knowledge. He was awarded the 1996
Bellcore prize for excellence in research. Dr. Ostrovsky works include the
invention of proactive security in cryptography; disproving the Tiwari
Conjecture; establishing that Private Information Retrieval is indeed
possible for a single database; establishing a surprising connection
between circuit complexity and privacy notions; as well as other fundamental
contributions to the theory of cryptography.

Dr. Ostrovsky has been recognized as a winner for the best published work at
SAIC in 1999 in the area of Information and Communications Technology (SAIC
is the parent company of Telcordia Technologies with over 38,000 employees)
and as a winner for the best published work at SAIC in both 2001 and 2002
in the area of Mathematics and Computer Science. Dr. Ostrovsky is a co-chair
of 2002 DIMACS Workshop on Cryptographic Protocols in Complex Environments,
and has been a member of a number of program committees including ACM STOC
(2000, 2003), CRYPTO (1998, 2002, and 2003), SCN (1999, 2002), SODA 2000 and
RANDOM 2002.

*The talk will be followed by refreshments in Ryerson 255*

Host: Janos Simon