e-Guest Lecture: Salim El Rouayheb

ON/OFF Privacy and Genomic Data

Prof. Salim El Rouayheb is fellow-in-residence at CY AS, invited by laboratory ETIS

Abstract:

In the first part of this talk, I will give a brief overview of different classical problems in privacy and security. This includes the well-known Alice-Bob-Eve wiretap problem, anonymity, private information retrieval, and differential privacy. One takeaway from this introduction is that privacy-preserving algorithms can incur high computation and communication costs. This motivates the second part of the talk, where we think of privacy as an expensive service that should be turned OFF when not needed. Much like one turns off the lights before leaving home. For example, one may want to turn his/her privacy ON or OFF depending on the internet connection, location, or device. The challenge here is that correlation in the data makes the problem of turning privacy OFF non-trivial. One has to worry about privacy, even when privacy is OFF, due to correlation. I will focus on information-theoretic measures for ON/OFF privacy and describe its application to privacy in designing mechanisms for hiding sensitive genotypes in genomic data.

Joint work with Carolina Naim, Fangwei Ye and Hyunghoon Cho.

Bio:

Salim El Rouayheb is an associate professor in the ECE Department at Rutgers University. From 2013 to 2017, he was an assistant professor at the ECE Department at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago. He was a research scholar at the Electrical Engineering Department at Princeton University (2012-2013) and a postdoc at the EECS department at the University of California, Berkeley (2010-2011). He received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Texas A&M University, College Station, in 2009. In 2019, he was the Rutgers University Walter Tyson Junior Faculty Chair. He received the Google Faculty Award in 2018 and the NSF CAREER award in 2016. His research interests lie in the area of information-theoretic security and privacy of data in networks and distributed systems.

Date : 21 January 2021 from 12h30 to 14h00

The video is online on the channel CYAS YouTube