PRIMA: an End-to-End Framework for Privacy at Scale
Stefano Braghin, IBM Research
12-1pm 23rd Mar 2018
Abstract
Person-specific data offer enormous opportunities for deriving insights that can radically improve different facets of our everyday lives, ranging from the provisioning of personalized medicine and healthcare, to the offering of smart transportation and smart energy. At the same time, the use of person-specific data to support these applications can come at a high cost to individuals’ privacy, unless proper de-identification technology is in place to provide rigorous privacy guarantees. We will present PRIMA, an end-to-end solution allowing decision makers to map out and execute their data privacy strategy through a comprehensive workflow. Our toolkit offers an intuitive risk-utility exploration framework for end users to navigate through the enormous number of possible combinations of anonymization settings and provide meaningful reports that help them understand the impact of each strategy in terms of utility and risk. Unlike traditional approaches, that rely on limited scale tools and manual analyses, our toolkit is the first scalable, production-grade system that can execute all of its components (such as vulnerability analysis, anonymization, risk and information loss measurements) on arbitrarily large datasets. Furthermore, it offers a flexible library for developers to integrate and extend its functionality to embed de-identification components into their applications.
Short Bio
Stefano Braghin is a Research Software Engineer in the IBM Research - Ireland centre in Dublin where he is a member of the Data Privacy group.
Stefano received his Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from University of Insubria, Italy with a thesis on an access control mechanism for open systems. From September to November 2008 Stefano visited the the College of Information Science, Pennsylvania State University as temporary research assistant. Between July 2011 and January 2013 Stefano was a research fellow of SANDS (S* Aspects of Network an Distributed Systems) group at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, where he worked on access control techniques for federated social networks and on team recommendation. Finally, prior to joining IBM Research Stefano was as a post-doctoral research at DERI (Digital Enterprise Research Institute), National University of Ireland, Galway, developing access control mechanisms for linked data.