Privacy Tools for Data Sharing: Lessons Learned and Directions Forward

Monday, December 11th, 2017 8:30 AM – 5:00 PM EST.

Spring 2018 marks the end of an interdisciplinary, 5-year NSF Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace Frontier Project “Privacy Tools for Sharing Research Data” at Harvard University. This one-day workshop brought past and present project participants together with potential users of privacy tools from academia, government, and industry to examine the goals and accomplishments of the project (including practical tools for sharing privacy-sensitive research data). The workshop discussed the lessons learned about both data privacy and interdisciplinary research and scoped out opportunities for future research, applications, and collaborations going forward.

Workshop Agenda

8:30am - 9:00am: Registration and Breakfast

9:00am - 10:40am: The Privacy Tools Project
Salil Vadhan: An Overview of the Privacy Tools Project
Merce Crosas: DataTags in Dataverse
James Honaker: PSI (Ψ): a Private Data Sharing Interface
Alexandra Wood: A Modern Approach to Privacy Law and Policy
Urs Gasser: Recoding Privacy Law: Reflections on the Future Relationship Among Law, Technology, and Privacy

10:40am - 11:10am: Coffee Break

11:10am - 1:00pm: Application Areas
Sam Madden: Towards a Licensing Model and Ecosystem for Data Sharing
Dustin Tingley and Glenn Lopez: Student LMS Data: Data Pipeline and Privacy Considerations
John Abowd: Why the Census Bureau Adopted Differential Privacy for the 2020 Census of Population
Lucila Ohno-Machado: Privacy Preserving Technology and Policy: Institution and Patient-Centered Approaches
Mayank Varia: Privacy-Preserving Scientific Data Analysis in an Open Cloud


1:00pm - 2:00pm: Lunch

2:00pm - 3:30pm: Alumni Presentations
Jonathan Ullman: Preventing False Discovery via Differential Privacy
Michel Reymond: Choosing the Right Toolbox -- Reflections on the Meaning of “Privacy” in the European Union
Vito D'Orazio: TwoRavens and Software Development on Academic Projects
Adam Tanner: Our Bodies, Our Data: How Companies Make Billions Selling Our Medical Records

3:30pm - 4:00pm: Coffee Break

4:00pm - 5:00pm: New Directions
Micah Altman: Advancing Robot Lawyers: Towards Automated License Generation and Interoperable Protected Research Data
Stephen Chong: Computing over Distributed Sensitive Data
Kobbi Nissim: Formal Privacy Models and Title 13


5:00pm - 6:30pm: Reception & Poster Session