Abstract:

As information and computing technologies and "big data" analysis become more pervasive, so too does the concern about the privacy of sensitive information. In order to fulfill the promise of these technologies to make advances in areas such as health care, energy, smart communities, and homeland security, it is necessary to ensure that privacy protections are built in to the solutions. Differential privacy has been put forth as a promising technique for protecting the privacy of individuals while still enabling the use of data in many applications. In this talk, I will provide a brief overview of the privacy landscape, and then discuss differential privacy solutions in the context of anomaly detection and in the ongoing Jana project to provide private data as a service that integrates secure multiparty computation and differential privacy.

Bio:

Dr. Rebecca Wright is a professor in the Computer Science Department and Director of DIMACS at Rutgers. Her research is primarily in the area of information security, including cryptography, privacy, foundations of computer security, and fault-tolerant distributed computing. Dr. Wright serves as an editor of the International Journal of Information and Computer Security and of the Transactions on Data Privacy, and is a member of the board of the Computer Research Association's Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research (CRA-W). She received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Yale University, a B.A. from Columbia University, and an honorary M.E. from Stevens Institute of Technology. She is a Fellow of the IEEE and a Distinguished Member of the ACM.