If you are doing work on or have an interest in sociotechnical aspects of deploying DP, please join the community! Joining entails including your profile on the website (SIGNUP HERE) so that others (researchers, journalists, etc) can find you and learn more about your work.
Find a recap of the workshop here!
Amina Abdu
PhD Candidate, University of Michigan
Amina’s research examines how computing practices and expertise shape public policy and its implementation. In the context of privacy, her work considers how privacy-enhancing technologies encode policy choices and scope participation in the policy-making process.
Rachel Cummings
Associate Professor, Columbia University
My research interests lie broadly in differential privacy, and draw upon an interdisciplinary toolkit that spans machine learning, algorithm design, economics, optimization, statistics, HCI, usable security, and public policy. I am especially interested in the challenges and solutions around the use of theoretical tools for privacy-preserving data analysis in practice.
Ishanya
Research Student, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Bhopal (IISER)
I am interested in data privacy with a focus on its applications in healthcare and finance. Having predominantly worked on healthcare-related projects, I am particularly drawn to how differential privacy can protect sensitive medical data while still enabling meaningful insights and innovations.
Palak Jain
PhD Candidate, Boston University
My work focuses on bringing robust data protections into practice through the lenses of cryptography, differential privacy, and ML. During my PhD, I’ve worked on characterizing the achievable privacy-accuracy trade-offs in the continual release model of differential privacy, thinking about some concrete differences between Privacy Law scholarship and Privacy Engineering scholarship, and modelling secure instant messaging in the UC framework (to analyze the security of the Signal protocol). More recently, I’ve worked on a protocol for journalists to analyse messaging trends in donated text messages, and a new analytical framework for reasoning about privacy which directly reckons with the intended utility of the data aggregation. You can find more information about me on my website (thepalakjain.com)
Representative Papers:
Priyanka Nanayakkara
Postdoctoral Fellow, Harvard University
I am interested in enabling privacy-preserving data science by developing tools that make differential privacy usable. This work has included building interactive visualization interfaces & documentation for data curators and data analysts, and explanations of privacy guarantees for data subjects.
Representative Papers:
Elissa Redmiles
Clare Luce Booth Assistant Professor, Georgetown University
elissa.redmiles@georgetown.edu
In an effort to simultaneously protect users’ welfare and platforms’ business interests, there is increasing focus on deploying DP and other PETs to protect user data and inferences made from that data. However, it is unclear whether the guarantees offered by PETs address the privacy concerns of the data subjects those PETs are designed to protect. People’s privacy concerns significantly influence their adoption of, engagement with, and ability to benefit from technology as well as the regulations suggested by legislators.Technically improving the privacy of people’s data is insufficient if these approaches do not also mitigate people’s privacy concerns. My research focuses on balancing stakeholder priorities (data subjects, data users, privacy experts) in PET implementations and developing the resources necessary for users to have transparency into how their data is being protected by technically-complex PETs.
Representative Papers:
- “I need a better description”: An Investigation Into User Expectations For Differential Privacy
- The Need for Respectful Technologies: Going Beyond Privacy
- Ctrl-Shift: How Privacy Sentiment Changed from 2019 to 2021
- What Are the Chances? Explaining the Epsilon Parameter in Differential Privacy
- Exploring Privacy and Incentives Considerations in Adoption of COVID-19 Contact Tracing Apps
- The Role of Privacy Guarantees in Voluntary Donation of Private Health Data for Altruistic Goals
Jayshree Sarathy
Senior Research Fellow, Northeastern University
Jayshree’s research draws on perspectives from computer science and technology studies to advance our understanding of responsible data science. Her current work studies the deployment of formal privacy techniques within the U.S. federal statistical system and the Wikimedia Foundation.
Adam Smith
Product Manager, The Everyone Project
Optimizing the protection and utility of DEI data