Cynthia Dwork is a senior researcher at Microsoft Research, Silicon Valley Campus, and a consulting professor at Stanford University. She earned her bachelor's from Princeton University and her master's and doctorate degrees from Cornell University. Dwork has focused her research on foundations of cryptography, complexity theory, Web search, voting theory, distributed computing, interconnection networks, and algorithm design and analysis. Her most recent work is on privacy-preserving datamining. In addition to having worked at the IBM Almaden Research Center and the Compaq Systems Research Center and IBM, she has taught at Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley, and at the University of Siena, Italy. Dwork has published numerous articles in the Journal of the ACM and the SIAM Journal on Computing.

More information on Dwork can be found in: http://research.microsoft.com/users/dwork

Talk title:
Towards Privacy in Public Databases

Abstract:
Privacy - and its loss - is a subject of increasing interest as access to information becomes widespread. For technologists to respond to growing demands for privacy protection, precise definitions of specific aspects of privacy are essential. In our view, despite extensive work in the computer science and statistics communities, basic definitions are still lacking.

This talk concentrates on the problem of "sanitizing" high-dimensional data, such as census data. The difficulty is to balance privacy preservation against utility. Our definition of privacy is motivated by the intuition that the privacy of an individual is preserved to the extent that the individual "blends in with the crowd". Based on this definition, using a geometric approach, we describe some sanitization methods that preserve privacy as well as utility.

Joint work with Shuchi Chawla, Frank McSherry, Adam Smith, and Hoeteck Wee.