Workshop on Privacy and Confidentiality; July 19-26, 2005,Italy.

Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA

Investigators

Abstract

This award supports travel and expenses for selected participants in a Workshop on Privacy and Confidentiality, to be held July 9-15, 2005 at the University of Bologna Residential Center in Bertinoro, Italy. The workshop comes at a time when governments and organizations are struggling to expand access to statistical and other databases while simultaneously protecting medical and other administrative records, and combating breaches of cyberinfrastructure security, especially those involving unauthorized record linkage and individual identification and harm. There has been a long tradition of confidentiality associated with statistical databases, but the ever-expanding cyberinfrastructure raises new and far more challenging questions about the protection of privacy associated with electronic databases involving individuals, families and other groups, and organizations. The goal of this workshop is to bring together leading privacy researchers from the statistics and computer science communities to share expertise and map out feasible research goals. It will (1) help shape an interdisciplinary methodologically-oriented intellectual agenda for the area of privacy and confidentiality by establishing commonly understood terminology, goals, and methodological description, (2) stimulate new interdisciplinary collaborations on the topic, and (3) influence the directions that confidentiality research takes in the separate disciplines. Specific areas of investigation include finding mathematically/statistically rigorous definitions of confidentiality, disclosure, and privacy that transcend specific problem and model details, finding minimal definitions of statistical utility, understanding the tension between privacy and utility, and understanding the role of auxiliary information ("extra" information known to the adversary) in defeating privacy objectives.