Open Course Materials
The Privacy Tools for Sharing Research Data project is supporting the development of new curricular material and training a new generation of researchers and citizens with the multidisciplinary perspectives required to address the complex issues surrounding data privacy.
Through our project's research efforts, we hope to drive the creation of new educational materials and modules in Harvard’s ongoing effort to enhance awareness of the opportunities and risks associated with the development of digital culture. Our existing and planned undergraduate, graduate and open-access curricula will immediately incorporate new ideas developed through this project on how and why the information all around us can be made trustworthy and used for personal and public benefit.
With these goals in mind, we are pleased to be able to offer the following educational resources on a variety of topics related to privacy. We will continually update these materials in the future, in the hopes of creating a valuable public resource for education on data privacy.
Bits: The Computer Science of Digital Information
This course focuses on information as quantity, resource, and property. We study the application of quantitative methods to understanding how information technologies inform issues of public policy, regulation, and law. How are music, images, and telephone conversations represented digitally, and how are they moved reliably from place to place through wires, glass fibers, and the air? Who owns information, who owns software, what forms of regulation and law restrict the communication and use of information, and does it matter? How can personal privacy be protected at the same time that society benefits from communicated or shared information?
Instructor: Harry R. Lewis, PhD, Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science, Harvard University
The recorded lectures are from the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences course Quantitative Reasoning 48, which was offered as an online course at the Extension School. The Quicktime and MP3 formats are available for download, or you can play the Flash version directly.
CRCS Lunch Seminars (on Privacy)
Harvard’s Center for Research on Computation and Society (CRCS) brings computer scientists together with a broad range of scholars from other fields to tackle fundamental computational problems arising from societal issues, such as privacy, security, and crowdsourcing. As a vital hub for the Privacy Tools for Sharing Research Data project, CRCS plays a key role in developing the educational materials on privacy that we hope to disseminate.
As part of their educational outreach efforts, CRCS hosts a bi-weekly seminar related to the wide array of research being conducted by its Faculty, Fellows, and Visitors. Here, we are happy to present those seminars that are specifically geared towards the domain of privacy.
CS 227r: Topics In Cryptography and Privacy Course Materials
Reading Materials
1. Sanjeev Arora, Elad Hazan, and Satyen Kale. The multiplicative weights update method: a meta algorithm and applications. Theory of Computing, Volume 8(6), pp. 121-164, 2012
2. Dwork, C. and Roth, A. 2013. The algorithmic foundations of differential privacy.
 | the_algorithmic_foundations_of_differential_privacy.pdf | 2.1 MB |
| the_multiplicative_weights_update_method.pdf | 377 KB |
Introduction to Cryptography (CS 127/CSCI E-127)
Prof. Salil P. Vadhan
Course Description:
Algorithms to guarantee privacy and authenticity of data during communication and computation. Rigorous proofs of security based on precise definitions and assumptions. Topics may include one-way functions, private-key and public-key encryption, digital signatures, pseudorandom generators, fully homomorphic encryption, and the role of cryptography in network and systems security.
Course website: http://people.seas.harvard.edu/~salil/cs127/
Fall 2013 Offering
- Syllabus
- Schedule & Assignments
- Live stream of lectures & section (login required, select CSCI E-127 at class time)
- On-demand lecture & section videos (login required)
- RSS feed to lecture & section podcasts (public)
- YouTube playlist of all lectures and sections (public)
Fall 2006 Offering
(Note: Formerly numbered CS 120/CSCI E-177, last offered Fall 2006.)