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The Alan Turing Institute

Privacy-preserving data analysis

How can we enable personal data to be shared without compromising our privacy?

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Status

Ongoing
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Research areas

Privacy & trust Differential privacy Statistical methods & theory Artificial intelligence Machine learning

Introduction

Huge amounts of data exist about every one of us, the use of which has the potential to improve our lives and the world we live in. However, concerns about the privacy of this data have naturally become an increasingly prevalent issue. The aim of privacy-preserving analysis is to utilise this data to its fullest potential without compromising our privacy.

 

Explaining the science

 

 

 

Aims

  • To understand the interplay between different privacy-enhancing techniques and how they can be used in practice for privacy-preserving data analysis.
  • It is important to develop a unified approach to secure, privacy-preserving data analysis as well as finding an effective, mathematically robust definition of privacy.
  • We will organise periodic workshops and talks at the Turing, as well as lectures and tutorials aimed at a general audience. Although the focus of the group is on technical aspects, engaging with researchers on ethical and regulatory aspects will be one of the workshops’ goals.

Why now?

  • Privacy-preserving data analysis has become a crucial aspect of data science, and is recognised as an important problem within several research communities.
  • Recent advances in cryptography, systems, and hardware security, have made privacy-preserving computation practical.
  • There are several deployments in existing and new products, and lots of interest both from industry and the government.

Talking points

Finding secure ways of providing public access to private datasets

Challenges: Technical issues, security breaches, human errors or scalability

Example output: Making health data accessible to researchers

Enabling joint analysis on private data held by several organisations

Challenges: Privacy concerns

Example output: Joining data from two medical organisations to produce more accurate analysis

Securely outsourcing computations on private data

Challenges: A cryptographic approach or a hardware based approach, or a combination

Example output: Leveraging cloud infrastructure to free organisations from having to maintain their own secure data centres

Securely decentralising services that rely on private data from individuals

Challenges: Avoiding storing particular individual’s data in a central server, avoiding re-identification

Example output: Computing aggregate statistics from user data collected from mobile devices or internet browsers

How to get involved

Click here to join us and request sign-up

Organisers

Researchers

Contact info

[email protected]

External researchers

Amir Houmansadr, University of Massachusetts Amherst 
Antti Koskela, University of Helsinki
Aurélien Bellet, Inria
Boris Köpf, Microsoft Research
Borja Balle, DeepMind
Bristena Oprisanu, UCL
Benny Pinkas, Bar-Ilan University
Carmela Troncoso, EPFL
Florian Tramèr, Stanford University
Georgi Ganev, Hazy and UCL
Hamed Haddadi, Imperial College
Jamie Hayes, DeepMind
Jason McFall, Privitar 
Lorenzo Cavallaro, King’s College London
Luca Melis, AWS Security
Mohammad Naseri, UCL
Nicolas Papernot, University of Toronto
Olya Ohrimenko, University of Melbourne
Santiago Zanella-Béguelin, Microsoft Research
Shruti Tople, Microsoft Research
Tejas Kulkarni, Aalto University
Yang Zhang, CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security
Mohannad Ismail, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
Antti Honkela, University of Helsinki
Luca Viganò, King’s College London
Shahbaz Rezaei, University of California, Davis
Ben Fielding, Gensyn
Shujun Li, University of Kent
Marcelo Damasceno de Melo, Instituto Federal de Educação, Ciência e Tecnologia do Rio Grande do Norte 
Mikko A. Heikkilä, University of Helsinki
Maharshi Dhada, University of Cambridge
Teddy Cunningham, University of Warwick
Jetzabel Maritza Serna-Olvera, Technical University of Catalonia and Rhein-Main University of Applied Sciences
Lukas Prediger, Aalto University 
Paola Cantarini, Visiting Fellow European University Institute, Italy
Temesghen Kahsai, Amazon
Javier Parra-Arnau, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC)
Gergely Acs, Budapest University of Technology and Economics
Shubham Jain, Imperial College London 
Tooska Dargahi, University of Salford
Ana-Maria Cretu, Imperial College London,  
Fawzia Zehra (Fuzzy) Kara-Isitt, Brunel University
Rachel Player, Royal Hollway University of London
Mahmood Sharif, VMware Research, and Tel Aviv University   
Raouf Kerkouche, Inria
Thorsten Strufe, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and Centre for Tactile Internet (CeTI/TU Dresden)
Apostolos Pyrgelis, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)
Zsolt István, ITU Copenhagen
Shivan Kaul Sahib, Brave Software
Milad Nasr, University of Massachusetts Amherst Milad Nasr
Sina Sajadmanesh École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)
Razane Tajeddine, University of Helsinki
Yang Lu, York St John University
Luc Rocher, Imperial College London
Burak Hasircioglu, Imperial College London
Ali Shahin Shamsabadi, Vector institute
Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye, Imperial College London
Clara Durodie, Cognitive Finance
Ranya Aloufi, Imperial College London
David Galindo, Birmingham University
Erman Ayday, Case Western Reserve University
Changyu Dong, Newcastle University
Beril Boz, University of Oxford
Hidde Lycklama à Nijeholt, ETH Zürich
Igor Bilogrevic, Google
Varun, Chandrasekaran, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Joonas Jälkö, Aalto University
Reza Shokri, National University of Singapore
Tabitha Ogilvie, Royal Holloway
Roberto Gonzalez, NEC Lab Europe
Kumar Sharad, Splunk, Germany 
Aladdin Ayesh, De Montfort University, Leicester

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