Type of Talk:  UTCS Colloquium

Speaker/Affiliati

on:  Ilya Mironov/Microsoft Research Silicon Valley

Date/Time:&

nbsp; Thursday, April 30, 2009  3:30 p.m.

Location:  A

CES 2.302

Host:  Vitaly Shmatikov

Talk Title:  &quo

t;Building Privacy into the Netflix Prize Contenders"

Talk Abs

tract:

A recommender system based on collaborative filtering is a dou

ble-edged sword. By aggregating and processing preferences of multiple user

s it may provide relevant recommendations, serving an important business p

urpose. On the flip side, a recommender system is a potential source of le

akage of private information shared by its users.

In the talk we
will define differential privacy for recommender systems and briefly surve

y leading approaches in the Netflix Prize competition. We will demonstrate

how these approaches can be adapted to provide differential privacy, witho

ut significantly degrading their accuracy.

Joint work with Fran

k McSherry, Microsoft Research.

Speaker Bio:

Ilya Mironov is a
researcher at Microsoft Research, Silicon Valley Campus. He works in the

areas of cryptography, cryptanalysis, and privacy of statistical database

s. Ilya received his PhD from Stanford in 2003, advised by Dan Boneh. In h

is thesis he cryptanalyzed the popular RC4 stream cipher modeling it as a c

ard shuffling scheme.