September 3, 2015: Invited Speaker Seminar: Query Log Sanitization with Guaranteed Privacy Protection

Dr. Yuan Hong
 

Thursday, September 3,2015, 4:00 p.m.
Room EV003.309

Abstract

User search query logs have proven to be very useful, but have vast potential for misuse. Several incidents have shown that simple removal of identifiers is insufficient to protect the identity of users. Publishing such inadequately anonymized data can cause severe breach of privacy. While significant effort has been expended on coming up with anonymity models and techniques for microdata, there is little corresponding work for query log data. Query logs are different in several important aspects, such as the diversity of queries, the causes of privacy breach, and the indistinguishability of Quasi-identifiers and sensitive values. This necessitates the demand to design privacy models and techniques specific to this environment. In this talk, I will present three different query log sanitization techniques which make the query logs publishable with guaranteed privacy protection. Specifically, different privacy notions are defined to satisfy in the sanitization algorithms in which the utility losses can be minimized. We give privacy analysis, and experimentally validate the performance of our techniques.

Biography

Dr. Yuan Hong is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Information Technology Management, and a faculty associate in the Forensics, Analysis, Complexity, Energy, Transportation and Security (FACET) Center at University at Albany, SUNY. He received the Ph.D. degree in Information Technology from Rutgers University in 2013, the Master degree in Computer Science from Concordia University, Canada in 2008, and the Bachelor degree in Management Information Systems from Beijing Institute of Technology, China in 2004. His research interests primarily lie at the intersection of Privacy, Security, Forensics, Optimization and Data Analysis. He has published in refereed journals and conferences proceedings, including IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, Journal of Computer Security, AAA Journal of Information Systems, Optimization Letters, CIKM, EDBT, ICDM, etc.