[Forum SIS] Seminario: Yosi Rinott su Privacy in data dissemination, differential privacy, and adaptivity,

[Antonio Pievatolo]

Giovedì 23 maggio alle 14:30, presso il CNR-IMATI, in via A. Corti, 12, 
Milano, Aula A, si terrà il seguente seminario:

Speaker: Yosi Rinott, The Hebrew University.

Title: Privacy in data dissemination, differential privacy, and adaptivity.

Abstract: I will demonstrate privacy issues that arise when an agency, 
for example ISTAT or a hospital,  disseminates data such as a sample 
from some population or experimental results to the public or to other 
agencies. Various methods used by statisticians to assess the disclosure 
risk, and to decrease it will be briefly reviewed (e.g., Dalenius 1977).
      In general, such methods depend on scenarios regarding potential 
intruders, such as the intruder’s prior knowledge about the sample or 
the population.  Differential Privacy (Dwork, McSherry, Nissim and 
Smith2006) is an approach that avoids the need to consider such 
scenarios, and guarantees a well-defined notion of privacy by adding 
noise to all released data. I will describe some basic results on 
differential privacy with some discussion of its application to the 
release of contingency tables (Dwork and Roth 2014, Rinott, O’Keefe, 
Shlomo, and Skinner 2018). Ongoing work on data analysis that takes the 
added noise into account will be discussed.
      An attempt to use ideas from differential privacy to control 
adaptive hypotheses testing or estimation will be described. Here, 
“adaptive” means  choosing the hypotheses to be tested after peeking 
(snooping) at the data, which is a major problem in data mining, and 
probably explains in part why so many contradictory finding appear in 
medical  journals.

-- 
Dr Antonio Pievatolo
IMATI-CNR
http://www.imati.cnr.it/joomla/index.php/people?layout=edit&id=101
ph. +39 02 23699 520