The 2024 OpenDP Community Meeting took place from August 22 to 23 at Harvard University. We joined forces with TPDP again this year, transitioning from the conference to the Community Meeting with an evening reception. Attendees reflected on the busy week of TPDP and greeted newcomers over appetizers and drinks in the Science and Engineering Complex courtyard.
If you registered for the Community Meeting, you can fill out our survey here. We’d love to hear from you whether or not you attended the meeting! The survey also includes general OpenDP questions and priorities that we would appreciate feedback from all members of the community.
Presentation Highlights
The next morning, over 100 attendees gathered in person for the Community Meeting with an additional 37 tuning in live on Zoom. Attendees browsed through their free copies of Hands-On Differential Privacy gifted by Microsoft before joining us for a day of presentations.
On day 1, we began with a welcome and updates from the OpenDP team. Salil Vadhan, Sharon Ayalde, Michael Shoemate, Annie Wu, and others from the OpenDP team shared progress on the project and priorities from the coming year.
Ilya Mironov from Meta delivered our first keynote on the Theory and Practice of DP-SGD, exploring differential privacy for machine learning. Gary Howarth from the National Institute of Standards and Technology and Christine Task from Nexus Research presented an interactive talk on Actionable Underpinning Problems in DP, introducing new perspectives on research questions. In the afternoon, we hosted a panel with representatives from six industry professionals to share insights about their organizations’ approaches to differential privacy. Thank you to Yaw Etse from Capital One, Seyi Feyisetan from Amazon, James Honaker from Mozilla Anonym, Christina Ilvento from Apple, and Rob Pisarczyk from Oblivious!
On day 2, we shifted our focus to the broader impact of differential privacy. Mayana Pereira from Microsoft spoke about Enhancing Open Data for Social Good, with a spotlight on digital literacy. Jeremy Epstein from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy followed with a keynote presentation on Government Activities to Advance Privacy Enhancing Technologies. If you were interested in any of the resources and opportunities that Jeremy mentioned in his keynote, you can find them in the description of his talk here.
Throughout the event, our community connected through scheduled programming and spontaneous conversations alike. Attendees fanned out across the spacious Science and Engineering Complex during breaks, seeking out speakers and continuing discussions— and engaging in some lively debates!
Pitch Anything
What do cars, financial records, and neural networks have in common? As we learned in our three Pitch Anything sessions, exciting opportunities for differential privacy. Fifteen presenters from across industry and academia pitched us their proposals for implementing differential privacy in a range of projects.
You can view recordings of the sessions (1, 2, and 3) and peruse their slides (1, 2, and 3) to find out more about each pitch.
Breakout Highlights
For such a diverse constituency, we offered opportunities for attendees to choose breakout sessions tailored to their specific interests. Sessions included Privacy Attacks and Auditing, Teaching Applied DP, OpenDP Research Challenges and Development Directions, and DP Beyond Algorithms.
During the Privacy Attacks and Auditing session, the privacy attacks task force provided an update on the status of the privacy attacks paper repository. The breakout session was led by Jonathan Ullman (Northeastern University), Yves-Alexandre de Montoye (Imperial College), James Honaker (Mozilla Anonym), Zachary Ratliff (Harvard University), and Sharon Ayalde (Harvard University/OpenDP). The larger working group then held a discussion on how to best classify the papers in the repository such as by the type of data release, adversarial model, theoretical vs. applied, and other criteria.
The “Learning by Doing: Teaching Applied DP” session featured demos from applied courses presented by Moshe Shenfeld (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) and Wanrong Zhang (TikTok), followed by a panel discussion moderated by Rachel Cummings and featuring Katrina Ligett (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Joe Near (University of Vermont), and Salil Vadhan (Harvard University). One of the insights from the discussion was that hands-on, applied learning can potentially benefit many different student populations—not just students who work hands-on with data and want to understand how to operationalize differential privacy, but also students who are more oriented towards theoretical research and benefit from a learning environment that invites them to experiment and to ask, “Why?”
In “OpenDP Research Challenges and Development Directions,” hosts Michael Shoemate and Vikrant Singhal from OpenDP presented a set of directions in terms of both the OpenDP Library and future research for OpenDP, which were based on the pre-meeting poll. Attendees gave their feedback on each direction regarding what they found to be useful immediately or what they thought might be useful for the broader community in the near future. The hosts and attendees also engaged in constructive discussions regarding specific algorithms and technologies for various items in the agenda. Feedback from the community is a continual process for OpenDP in terms of its future directions, and these conversations were a useful datapoint for that purpose.
The DP Beyond Algorithms session featured speakers from a range of universities: Rachel Cummings (Columbia University), Gabriel Kaptchuk (University of Maryland, College Park), Elissa Redmiles (Georgetown University), Priyanka Nanayakkara (Northwestern University), and Jayshree Sarathy (Columbia University). The session’s primary goal was to begin forming a community of researchers and practitioners working on sociotechnical aspects of deploying DP. Participants engaged in a three-part discussion to identify and ideate directions for future work. The discussion focused on past challenges encountered while deploying DP, anticipated future challenges around deploying DP, and community principles to guide our work going forward.
Workshop Highlights
On Friday afternoon, many attendees chose to stay for a workshop to continue the momentum from the DP Beyond Algorithms breakout session. The workshop’s primary goal was to begin forming a community of researchers and practitioners working on sociotechnical aspects of deploying DP. After hearing talks on challenges of transitioning DP from theory into practice, participants split into small groups to identify and ideate directions for future work. These discussions centered around the following topics: (1) technical and sociotechnical challenges of implementing DP, (2) evaluating DP deployments on the ground, (3) facilitating engagement around DP among parties like data subjects, data users, and policymakers, and (4) crafting law and policy for responsible DP deployments.
Hackathon Highlights
On the final day of the Community Meeting, our OpenDP developers hosted an afternoon hackathon. Eleven participants worked on a variety of projects: creating DP releases, performing principal component analysis, using plugins to integrate other libraries, and attacking a propose-test-release mechanism for private key release.
Our software developers at OpenDP were excited to work hands-on with users. As they helped students and researchers navigate the library, they received essential feedback on improving our software for future use. If you use the OpenDP Library, let us know!
New Working Group – Women in DP
At OpenDP, we seek to make differential privacy a field that is welcoming and inclusive for all. During our update on Community Strategy, Sharon Ayalde announced our newest project towards this goal: a new working group for women in DP. The group will be led by Sharon, Christine Task (Knexus Research), Mayana Pereira (Microsoft), Rachel Cummings (Columbia University), and Nina Wattenberg (OpenDP/Harvard University). Our goal is to build a network of women in the DP space and create opportunities for collaboration, community building, and professional development.
If you’d like to get involved, join the Women in DP Slack channel and fill out our interest form!
Thank You and Next Steps
The Community Meeting is a community effort. We could not have done it without our panelists, presenters, and keynote speakers. Thank you all! And thank you to our industry sponsors— CapitalOne, Oblivious, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Meta, Tumult Labs, and DPella— for supporting all the moving pieces of our events.
If you missed the meeting live, you can catch up with Zoom recordings of each session on the agenda. All the information about our speakers and plenary talks can be found here. And we always want your input! Join our Slack channel and mailing list to stay updated on new developments with OpenDP and learn about more ways to get involved.