Workshop on Defining Holistic Private Data Science for Practice

This workshop will focus on identifying viable paths towards reducing the gap between theoretical developments and practical applications of privacy-preserving tools in data science. Despite extensive research into privacy-preserving tools, such as differential privacy and multiparty computation, the translation of these tools into practice and real-world use remains limited.

Over the course of the three days, through a mix of presentations and targeted discussion groups, participants will delve into solutions for how novel privacy-enhancing technologies can be effectively translated to applications in real-world scenarios. We partition the problem space into four themes throughout the workshop. These themes are (1) understanding privacy needs in a range of practical contexts, (2) characterising the various costs of imposing privacy constraints on data science operations, (3) designing methods/benchmarks for evaluating the effectiveness of privacy-preserving solutions, and (4) developing strategies for communicating the above to key stakeholders.

Participants: Sebastian Benthall (New York University), Mark Bun (Boston University), Clément Canonne (University of Sydney), Aloni Cohen (University of Chicago), Shaanan Cohney (University of Melbourne), Rachel Cummings (Columbia University), Joerg Drechsler (Institute for Employment Research, IAB), Yaw Etse (Capital One), Talia Gillis (Columbia University), Yaxi Hu (Max Planck Insitute for Intelligent Systems), Palak Jain (Boston University), Bailey Kacsmar (University of Alberta), Gabriel Kaptchuk (University of Maryland), Gautam Kamath (University of Waterloo), Oliver Kosut (Arizona State University), Benjamin Laufer (Cornell Tech), Tamalika Mukherjee (Columbia University), Priyanka Nanayakkara (Harvard University), Simon Oya (University of British Columbia), Amartya Sanyal (University of Copenhagen), Jeremy Seeman (Urban Institute), Masoumeh Shafieinejad (Vector Institute), Kris Shrishak (Irish Council for Civil Liberties), Reza Shokri (National University of Singapore), Satchit Sivakumar (Boston University), Adam Smith (Boston University), Jon Ullman (Northeastern University), Sergei Vassilvitskii (Google), Lydia Zakynthinou (University of California, Berkeley), Wanrong Zhang (Harvard University)