Fighting Surveillance Capitalism with Mathematics

Event Date

CeDAR Director Thomas Strohmer will be speaking for the Faraway Fourier Talks Seminar Series on Monday November 1 at 11am, the title of his talk is "Fighting Surveillance Capitalism with Mathematics"

Abstract: 'Sharing is Caring', we are taught. However, in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism, a new economic system that pushes for relentless data capture and analysis, we better think twice what we share. As data sharing is increasingly locking horns with data-privacy concerns, synthetic data are gaining traction as a potential solution to the aporetic conflict between privacy and utility. The goal of synthetic data is to create an as-realistic-as-possible dataset, one that not only maintains the nuances of the original data, but does so without risk of exposing sensitive information. As such, synthetic data can be instrumental in reestablishing the balance between the need of data that drives AI advances and the fundamental right to data protection for citizens and consumers. However, the road to privacy is paved with NP-hard problems! In this talk I will present three recent mathematical breakthroughs in the NP-hard challenge of computationally efficiently creating synthetic data that come with provable privacy and utility guarantees. We draw from a wide range of mathematical concepts, including Boolean Fourier analysis, duality, empirical processes, and microaggregation. For instance, we will see some surprising connections between theoretical probability and anonymization. I will also present the first noisefree method to achieve differential privacy and discuss applications of our approach for data analysis tasks arising in the Intensive Care Unit.

This is joint work with March Boedihardjo and Roman Vershynin.

 

Zoom Link for November 1st Webinar: https://umd.zoom.us/j/98867286635?pwd=S2xpZG83RGRSUXR6NTdCdnFuSWFsdz09

Meeting ID: 988 6728 6635

Meeting  Passcode: 841276

 

Please visit our website for information about future talks, as well as links to past video presentations and talk slides: https://www.norbertwiener.umd.edu/FFT/2021/index.html