News

New Cooperative Agreement from the US Census Bureau

The Privacy Tools Project is excited to be a partner on the new Cooperative Agreement from the US Census Bureau awarded to Boston University, aimed at developing methods for providing formal privacy guarantees for data collected through complex sample surveys:

https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/research-matters/2020/09/three_cooperativeag.html

Salil Vadhan presents Keynote Address at COLT 2020

At the Conference on Learning Theory (COLT 2020), Salil Vadhan will present "The Theory and Practice of Differential Privacy". He will survey some of the recent theoretical advances and challenges in differential privacy, highlighting connections to learning theory. Salil will also discuss efforts toward wider practical adoption, such as OpenDP, a new community effort to build a suite of trusted, open-source tools for deploying differential privacy.

https://www.colt2020.org/virtual/speaker_1.html...

Dwork Awarded IEEE Hamming Medal

Cynthia Dwork, Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, was chosen for her “foundational work in privacy, cryptography, and distributed computing, and for leadership in developing differential privacy.”

Link to article: https://www.seas.harvard.edu/news/2019/12/dwork-awarded-ieee-hamming-medal

Applications Open for 2020 Summer Internship at the Berkman Klein Center

The Berkman Klein Center looks for law students to help the Privacy Tools Project research data privacy issues. Successful applicants will participate in the Berkman Klein Center's full time, 10-week summer internship program. Applications are due on March 15th, 2020 by 5 PM EST. For more information, please visit: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/getinvolved/internships2020.

Co-winner of the 2019 PET Award: "Bridging the Gap..."

"Bridging the Gap between Computer Science and Legal Approaches to Privacy" has been selected by the 2019 PET Award committee as a co-winner of the Caspar Bowden Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies.

About the award: https://petsymposium.org/award/

Link to article: https://privacytools.seas.harvard.edu/publications/bridging-gap-between-...

Suso Baleato wins Poster Prize in FAS Research Symposium

About the prize: Poster Prize of the 3rd Annual FAS Postdoc Research Symposium held June 21, 2019 at Northwest Building 52 Oxford Street. Organized by Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Sciences Office of Postdoctoral Affairs, and the FAS Postdoctoral Association. Donors include: QIAGEN, GENEWITZ,ThermoFisher Scientic, and Milipore Sigma.

About the poster: The poster shows how to use differential privacy with negligible utility loss to facilitate the replication and reuse of statistical analysis of sensitive datasets. We illustrate our approach with the case of the... Read more about Suso Baleato wins Poster Prize in FAS Research Symposium

Aloni Cohen named Aspen Tech Policy Hub Fellow

https://www.aspentechpolicyhub.org/fellows/ Read more about Aloni Cohen named Aspen Tech Policy Hub Fellow

New Course Spring 2019: Applied Privacy for Data Science

Computer Science 208: Applied Privacy for Data Science

The risks to privacy when making human subjects data available for research and how to protect against these risks using the formal framework of differential privacy. Methods for attacking statistical data releases, the mathematics of and software implementations of differential privacy, deployed solutions in industry and government. Assignments will include implementation and experimentation on data science tasks.

View more information on the...

Open Positions in the Privacy Tools Project

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Privacy Tools Retreat Monday 10/29, Tuesday 10/30

The Privacy Tools Project will be hosting a retreat on Monday, October 29, and Tuesday, October 30. All Privacy Tools colleagues and collaborators are welcome to join. The retreat will focus largely on work funded by the US Bureau of the Census and the National Science Foundation.

The schedule included in the PDF below is subject to change.

Harvard University Privacy Tools Project