Kobbi Nissim presented "Privacy: From Theory to Reality" at UMass Amherst's College of Information and Computer Sciences on Tuesday, December 8th 2015. His abstract is listed below:
Privacy: From Theory to Reality
The treatment of privacy in data analysis has taken a dramatic shift a little more than a decade ago - as failures of traditional privacy preserving techniques were beginning to accumulate, a theoretical, foundational approach to privacy emerged. A key product of this theoretical treatment is "differential privacy", a definition of privacy in the context of data analysis that has concrete privacy consequences.
Differential privacy became to be a rich, fast evolving framework for developing privacy preserving algorithms and for studying some of the fundamental properties of privacy. Moreover, differential privacy proved to interact fruitfully with other research areas, and to influence applications that are (seemingly) not related to privacy. With a mature theoretical basis, differential privacy is now at prime time for inclusion in real-world systems.
We will look into the intuition behind differential privacy, review some of is theory, and examine some of the challenges for applying differential privacy.
The talk would be self-contained, no prior background on privacy would be assumed.