What's New with Latanya Sweeney

At a glance:

• Harvard: Visiting researcher at Harvard. Visit my office at: Harvard Computer Science, Maxwell Dworkin Building, Room MD319, Cambridge, MA 02138. July 2008.

• MIT: Visiting professor at MIT. Visit my office at: MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL), The Stata Center, Room 32-383, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA 02139. Email: latanya@mit.edu. July 2008.

• Birth of my son! January 2008.

• PrivaMix: real-world experiments of a privacy-preserving surveillance system produced flawless results! Experiments conducted in DeMoines, Iowa earlier in the year demonstrated a method in which you can know where people have been without knowing who they are. Applications include HMIS and the watchlist. October 2007.

• EPIC's Advisory Board. The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) invited me to join their highly distinguished Advisory Board. September 2007. (more)

• New course! This course teaches students how to infuse cross-disciplinary knowledge into research or technology development to make sure created technology is provably appropriate for a given personal, societal, organizational, and/or legal context. Graduate version: Technology Dialectics. Undergraduate version: Constructing Appropriate Technology. September 2007. (more)

• Patent 7,269,578 issued to me, as sole inventor, covering k-anonymity and Datafly. August 2007. (application, news announcement)

• Pop City article about me and my work. August 2007. (article)

• Scientific American article about me and my work. July 2007. (article, interview Q&A)

• Radio interview with Chip Walter about me and my work. July 2007. (podcast)

• American Journal of Managed Care, paper entitled "Managing End-of-Life Care in Complex Patients Can Reduce Costs Without Shortening Life." This paper, joint with Andrew Halpert and Joan Waranoff, is significant for two reasons. First, it demonstrates that "patient-centered management" can sharply reduce utilization and costs over usual management without shortening life. As background, “patient-centered management” is a comprehensive patient-focused collaboration that includes end-of-life and pain management, education, provider coordination, and patient advocacy. It is an emerging model over utilization and case management, which are the current standards. This paper demonstrates cost-effective advantages of centering management around all the patient's circumstances. Second, this paper achieves this prospective clinical cohort study using anonymized data. February 2007. (paper, abstract)

• Named Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Privacy Technology.
  Launched $1000 Best Paper Prize Awards. The goal of the awards is to cross-fertilize research across the various communities engaged in the construction of privacy technology. Exalting great ideas in privacy, regardless of discipline, enables an international, transdisciplinary dialogue among scholars. We can build on each other's shoulders rather than walking past each other in the darkness of our disciplinary silos. Together, we may be able to tackle the most pressing privacy problems of our time. October 2006. (more)

• The National Science Foundation awards a $15 million, five-year grant for an Engineering Research Center, named the Quality of Life Technology Center. Kate Seelman and I are founding faculty leaders of one of the four research areas during the proposal competition and first year of operation. The new Center is a joint collaboration between Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh. It seeks to develop technologies that will help the elderly and people with disabilities remain productive in society and living in their homes longer. July 2006. (more)

• ... lots happened, details forthcoming...

• Paper in IEEE Internet Computing: "Protecting Job Seekers from Identity Theft." This paper describes a benevolent computer program called Identity Theft that scours the Internet looking for possible identity theft victims. When found, the program contacts the potential victims and describes how seemingly innoucuous information available in online resumes place them at risk. March 2006. (more)

• New paper: Risk Assessments of Personal Identification Technologies for Domestic Violence Homeless Shelters. This paper provides a framework for reasoning about and assessing proposed technical solutions that perform a national unduplicated accounting of visit patterns across domestic violence homeless shelters, while respecting the confidentiality of the clients who are the subjects of that accounting. January 2006.

• Teaching: Privacy Technology course at Carnegie Mellon University, School of Computer Science. (more)

• In the news: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, "The Thinkers: Data privacy drives CMU expert's work." An article about me and my work. December 26, 2005. (text)

• Paper in ACM SIGKDD Explorations: "Privacy-Enhanced Linking." This paper introduces a new way for computer scientists to think about providing privacy protection within link analysis (especially for law-enforcement and counter-terrorism purposes) and introduces the notion of "privacy-enhanced linking" as algorithms that perform link analysis with guarantees of privacy protection modeled after the Fair Information Practices. December 2005. (more)

• Invited talk: "De-Identifying Health Data." Health Canada (Federal Department of Health), Ottawa, Ontario Canada. December 1, 2005.

• Invited talk: "Strategies for De-Identifying Patient Data for Research." Electronic Health Information and Privacy Conference, Ottawa, Ontario Canada. November 30, 2005.

• Invited talk: "Risk Assessments of PIN Technologies [identity management] for Domestic Violence Shelters (Updated)." Housing and Urban Development. Washington, DC. November 18, 2005.

• Invited talk: "Identity Management: solutions of privacy not security", Guest Lecture in Course 17-606, Software Systems Security Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University. Pittsburgh, PA. November 16, 2005.

• Invited talk: "Identity Management: Dealing with Disclosure." 6th CACR, Toronto, Canada, November 3, 2005.

• Testimony: "Privacy Principles for Ubiquitous Technologies", Testimony before the Eurpoean Commission, Brussels, Belgium, October 25, 2005.

• Invited talk: "Aging with Dignity: Privacy need not be traded for technical assistance." Technology for Life and Living Conference, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Pittsburgh, PA, October 21, 2005.

• Best Paper of the Year Award: The paper "How (not) to protect genomic data privacy in a distributed network: using trail re-identification to evaluate and design anonymity protection systems," authored with Bradley Malin received one of the highest honors possible for a paper in medical informatics --inclusion in the Yearbook of Medical Informatics which selects the "best of the year" among all peer-reviewed published journal papers in the field. Awarded October 2005. (more, paper)

• In the news: CBS News, Denver, "Angel Protects Those Who Might be Targets for ID Theft," October 20, 2005. Interview about my Identity Angel project. (text, video)

• New paper: "Managing End-of-Life Care in Complex Patients Can Reduce Costs Without Shortening Life or Sacrificing Patient Satisfaction", (with Andrew Halpert and Joan Waranoff of Blue Shield California). This paper reports on a prospective cohort study conducted in California in which a comprehensive patient centered collaboration that includes end-of-life and pain management, education, provider coordination, and patient advocacy sharply reduced costs without shortening life or sacrificing patient satisfaction. October 2005. (more)

• Testimony: "Recommendations to Identify and Combat Privacy Problems in the Commonwealth", Testimony before the Pennsylvania House Select Committee on Information Security (HR351), Pittsburgh, PA, October 5, 2005. (Testimony and Appendices)

• In the news: CBS News, New York, "Why A Resume Could Bring A Job, But Also ID Theft: Identity Theft From Online Resumes On The Rise," Septmber 28, 2005. Interview about my Identity Angel project. (text, video)

• Invited talk: "Privacy Technologies for Large Research Databases" Spectrum Health and Michigan State University, Grand Rapids, MI, September 23, 2005. (Slides and Abstract)

• Invited talk: "Biometrics Alone Won't Do: Developing Holistic Identity Management Solutions" Biometrics Symposium 2005, Arlington, VA, September 19, 2005. (Slides and Abstract)

• Invited talk: "Risk Assessments of PIN Technologies [unique personal identifiers] for Domestic Violence Shelters," National HMIS Conference, St. Louis, Missouri, September 13, 2005. (Slides and Abstract)

• Paper in IEEE Intelligent Systems about privacy and homeland security, entitled: Privacy-Preserving Surveillance using Selective Revelation. This paper describes an approach for sharing data for surveillance purposes while maintaining privacy. July 2005. (more)

• Testimony: "Privacy Technologies for Homeland Security", Testimony before the Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee of the Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”), Boston, MA, June 15, 2005. (Testimony and Appendices)

• Invited talk: "HIPAA Strategies for De-Identifying Patient Data for Research," American Association of Medical Colleges (AAMC), National Conference, Group on Information Resources, Philadelphia, PA. April 12, 2005. (Slides and Abstract)

• Invited talk: "Privacy Technology in the Face of Information Warfare", Guest Lecture in Course 19-601, Information Warfare, Carnegie Mellon University. Pittsburgh, PA. March 29, 2005. (Slides and Abstract)

• Invited talk: "Privacy Technology: Artificial Intelligence to Save the World", AAAI Spring Symposium. Stanford. Palo Alto, CA. March 23, 2005. (Slides, References and Abstract).

• Invited talk: "Beyond Ickiness is Risk: The Exasperation of Data Privacy Problems by Implanted RFIDs", The Concealed I Conference, University of Ottawa, Ontario Canada. March 4, 2005. (Slides, References and Abstract).

• Member of the Program Committee for the Workshop on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PET) 2005. (more).

• Thesis advisor for Ralf Holzer's completed Masters thesis, "Email Alias Detection Using Network Analysis." March 2005. (more)

• Invited talk: "Privacy Technology: Computer Scientists Help Save the World", Intel Privacy Forum. Intel. Hillsboro, OR. March 2, 2005. (Slides, References and Abstract).

• Paper in AAAI Spring Symposium entitled AI Technologies to Defeat Identity Theft Vulnerabilities. This paper demonstrates how information from on-line resumes can be automatically harvested in order to acquire fraudulent new credit cards. February 2005. (more)

• Paper in AAAI Spring Symposium entitled Mining Images in Publicly-Available Cameras for Homeland Security (with Ralph Gross). This paper describes a technology that tracks the number of people appearing in publicly-available webcams. February 2005. (more)

• Paper in AAAI Spring Symposium entitled Technologies to Defeat Fraudulent Schemes Related to Email Requests (with Edoardo Airoldi and Bradley Malin). This paper describes a technology for tracking criminal relations behind scam spam. February 2005. (more)

• Paper/Poster in AAAI Spring Symposium entitled Privacy-Preserving Bio-Terrorism Surveillance. This paper/poster describes a real-world application in which surveillance is performed with data that are provably sufficiently anonymized under HIPAA. More generally, data are provided on a sliding scale of identifiability termed "selective revelation." February 2005. (more)

• Paper/Poster in AAAI Spring Symposium entitled Towards a Privacy-Preserving Watchlist. This paper/poster describes a key problem in homeland surveillance ("the watchlist problem") and examines two challenges that continue to make it an unsolved problem. February 2005. (more)

• Member of the Program Committee for Modeling Decisions for Artificial Intelligence (MDAI) 2005. (more).

• Paper in IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (with Elaine Newton and Bradley Malin) appeared, entitled Preserving Privacy by De-identifying Facial Images. This paper provides an algorithm for provably de-identifying faces appearing in video while retaining many facial details. Uses k-anonymity. February 2005. (more)

• Finished a paper (with Yiheng Li) entitled Adding Semantics and Rigor to Association Rule Learning: the GenTree Approach, which introduces an automated learner for learning semantically useful association rules across all attributes of a relational table. Accomplishing this required: (1) more rigorous mining than afforded by traditional approaches; and, (2) the invention of "knowledge ratings" for learned rules, not just statistical ratings. January 2005. (more)

  2004

• Invited talk: "Privacy for Those Who Can Afford It", Guest Lecture in Graduate Course 17-899, Technology and Development for 4 Billion, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University. Pittsburgh, PA. November 17, 2004. (Slides and Abstract)

• Invited talk: "Tackling Proposals", PhD Program in Computation, Organizations and Society, Graduate Seminar. School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University. Pittsburgh, PA. November 15, 2004. (Slides and Abstract).

• Special talk: Privacy Technology for the NCPI, Special presentation at a joint meeting of Vanderbilt University and the Center for Automated Learning and Discovery, at the School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University. November 4, 2004. (Slides and References)

• Invited talk: "Privacy Technology: The Frontier", 13th CACR Information Security Workshop & 5th Annual Privacy and Security Workshop. Privacy & Security: Seeking the Middle Path. The University of Toronto, Canada. October 29, 2004. (Slides and References)

• Invited talk: "Tracking Terrorism Using Privacy-Preserving Surveillance", at Tracking Terrorism in the 21st Century: A national symposium on the role of Science and Law in Detecting, Investigating, and Adjudicating Political Violence. Dusquene University School of Law, The Cyril H. Wecht Institute of Forensic Science and Law. Pittsburgh, PA. October 2004. (Slides and References)

• Invited talk: "Privacy Technology", Access and Privacy Workshop: Connecting citizens and government calls for openness, transparency and strategy. Office of the Privacy Commissioner. Toronto, Ontario, Canada. October 2004. (Slides and References)

• Invited talk: "Privacy-Preserving Surveillance", United States Department of Homeland Security: Directions for the Data Sciences Research Agenda. Alexandria, VA. September 2004. (Slides and References)

• Invited talk: "Privacy Technology: New Directions for Computer Science", CERIAS Seminar Series, Purdue University. West Lafayette, IN. September 2004. (Slides and References)

• Teaching NEW graduate course on how to do computer science research. This course is called the Computation, Organizations & Society Lab (ISRI 17-710). September 2004. (more)

• Teaching undergraduate and graduate course: Privacy and Anonymity in Data (CSD 15-394, ISRI 17-802). This is the 5th time the course is being provided. September 2004. (more)

• Finished a paper (with Michael Shamos), entitled A Multiparty Computation for Randomly Ordering Players and Making Random Selections, which provides a means for players to make local choices that when combined, jointly select a permutation randomly. July 2004. (more)

• Got my motorcycle license and a new motorcycle. July 2004. (more)

  ...

  2003

• Teaching undergraduate and graduate course on Privacy and Anonymity in Data. This is the 3rd time the course is being provided. September 2003. (more)

• Helped launch a new PhD program in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon. This in the PhD program is Computation, Organizations and Society. This was work done with Kathleen Carley (Director), Norman Sadeh (co-Director) and myself (co-Director), and many in the SCS faculty. August 2003. (more)

• Invited participant in a panel discussion at ACM KDD, the premier conference on data mining. Topic of discussion was privacy concerns over data mining efforts for national security. August 2003.

• Hosted two brainstorming sessions for faculty at the School of Computer Science at CMU. Topic was computer science research and privacy concerns in emerging technologies. Resulted in a white paper. July 2003. (more)

• Finished a paper about RosterFinder, which locates web pages contains lists of names of people. Given a description of the kind of roster sought, RosterFinder returns a rank ordered list of rosters best matching the given search criteria. June 2003. (more)

• An organizer for a 2-day workshop for computer scientists on data privacy called Privacy in D.A.T.A. Held March 27-28, 2003 at CMU. Sponsored by the NSF Aladdin Center and the Data Privacy Lab at CMU. Other organizers are Guy Blelloch, Lenore Blum, and Manuel Blum. (more)

• Finished a paper describing a method for de-identifying faces in video survillance tapes. This method, called k-Same, guarantees that no face recognition software can accurately recognize the resulting images even though many of the facial details are preserved. This is work with Elaine Newton and Bradley Malin. March 2003. (more).

• Finished a paper on ways to re-identify people from the seemingly innocent data they leave behind. Examples include: DNA sequences left by hospital patients and IP addresses left by on-line consumers. This is work with Bradley Malin and Elaine Newton. February 2003. (more).

• Finished a critique on the field of artificial intelligence (AI). Surveys of AI references are used to show a mismatch between what researchers do when they say they are doing AI and what researchers say is AI. January 2003. (more).

• Keynote speaker at PSB, Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing. This is a premier bioinformatics conference. January 2003. (more).

• Received a Privacy Leadership Award from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan. November 2002.

• Published two technical papers on my k-anonymity protection model. October 2002. (more about first or second).

• Computer World, October 14, 2002, "Privacy algorithms." (more, text)

• Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, August 15, 2002, "Seeing profits in privacy, recent transplant launches firm to protect individual identities." (more)

• Comments on Proposed Modifications to HIPAA Privacy Rule (more) 4/26/2002

• 20/20 Television News Magazine [20 second clip regarding pharmacy data]

• Published paper on how much information is collected on people. December 2001. (more).

• National Journal's Technology Daily, July 14, 2000, "Senator predicts three-pronged medical privacy plan." (text)

• New York Times, Feburary 16, 2000.

• ZDNet, April 7, 1999, "Free speech and privacy forever." (text)

• Los Angeles Times, February 8, 1999, "A new push is on for Patients Privacy Law." (text)

In the popular press:

• Computer World, October 14, 2002, "Privacy algorithms." (more, text)

• Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, August 15, 2002, "Seeing profits in privacy, recent transplant launches firm to protect individual identities." (more)

• 20/20 Television News Magazine [20 second clip regarding pharmacy data]

• National Journal's Technology Daily, July 14, 2000, "Senator predicts three-pronged medical privacy plan." (text)

• New York Times, Feburary 16, 2000.

• ZDNet, April 7, 1999, "Free speech and privacy forever." (text)

• Los Angeles Times, February 8, 1999, "A new push is on for Patients Privacy Law." (text)