[CS] Steven Xia Candidacy Exam/Jan 7, 2026

[via cs]

This is an announcement of Steven Xia's Candidacy Exam.
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Candidate: Steven Xia

Date: Wednesday, January 07, 2026

Time:  3 pm CST

Location: JCL 356

Title: Enabling Trustworthy Data Sharing in Data Ecosystems

Abstract: Data sharing is central to various applications such as fraud detection, ad matching, and improving patient care. However, each solution to data sharing is bespoke and cost-intensive, hampering value generation. We identify the lack of abstractions to control data release as the culprit of the problem. For example, it is common to have constraints on whether to share data that depend on the result of sharing, and evaluating these constraints requires sharing in the first place, leading to a standstill. To help people build solutions to a wide variety of data sharing applications, we propose programmable dataflows, which consists of two components. The first component is an abstraction, the contract, which agents use to communicate the intent of a data sharing action and evaluate its consequences before the dataflow takes place. This helps agents control the release of their data. The second component is a contract programming model (CPM), which allows agents to program data sharing applications catered to each problem's needs with the contract abstraction. We describe how to deploy those applications on a data escrow to ensure data remains protected from unintended data releases.

Advisors: Raul Castro Fernandez

Committee Members: Raul Castro Fernandez, Haifeng Xu, and Michael Franklin