[Colloquium] Cynthia Dwork on October 6, 2004 at 4:00 P.M.

[Margery Ishmael]

DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE - TALK

Date: Wednesday, October 6, 2004
Time: 4:00 p.m.
Place: Ryerson 251

***Refreshments BEFORE the talk at 3:45 p.m. in Ry 255***
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Speaker:  CYNTHIA DWORK

From:  Microsoft Research

Url:  http://research.microsoft.com/users/dwork/

Title:  Toward Privacy in Public Databases

Abstract:

We will describe definitions and algorithmic results for the ``census 
problem''. Informally, in a census individual respondents give private 
information to a trusted (and trustworthy) party, who publishes a 
sanitized version of the data. There are two fundamentally conflicting 
requirements: privacy for the respondents and utility of the sanitized 
data. Unlike in the study of secure function evaluation, in which 
privacy is preserved to the extent possible given a specific 
functionality goal, in the census problem privacy is paramount; 
intuitively, things that cannot be learned ``safely'' should not be 
learned at all.

  The definition of privacy and the requirements for a safe sanitization 
are important contributions of this work. Our definition of privacy 
formalizes the notion of protection from being brought to the attention 
of others -- one's privacy is maintained to the extent that one blends 
in with the crowd. Our definition of a safe sanitization emulates the 
definition of semantic security for a cryptosystem and says, roughly, 
that an adversary given access to the sanitized data is not much more 
able to compromise privacy than an adversary who is not given access to 
the sanitization.

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Host:  JANOS SIMON

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