學院消息

Topic：Privacy-Aware Computing on Public Cloud Systems

Time: 12/20(Wed) 3:30-5:30 PM

Location: ED 117

Speaker：: Prof. Parmesh Ramanathan

Associate Dean in the Graduate School

Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Wisconsin, Madison

【Outline】

Public cloud systems are increasingly being used to solve computationally expensive problems. However, it requires a customer to send problem instances containing design information to untrusted entity with significant potential for leakage of sensitive information. My research group has been developing privacy-aware techniques to hide all the given sensitive information in a problem instance and solve an obfuscated problem using the computational resources in the cloud without revealing any of the sensitive information to the cloud infrastructure. For many applications, we have shown that this can be achieved without significantly increasing the computational complexity of the original privacy-agnostic solution to the problem.

In this talk, I will give a brief overview of different privacy models and highlight some of the privacy-aware applications that we have studied in my research group. I will then focus on our recent work on genomic sequencing applications, where I will show how we can solve the read alignment problem on an untrusted cloud without revealing sensitive information such as Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs). I will also show results comparing the runtimes of privacy-aware solutions with that of privacy-agnostic solutions and show that the increase in the computational complexity are not substantial.

【Backgorund】

Prof. Parmesh Ramanathan is an Associate Dean in the Graduate School and a Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Wisconsin, Madison. He received his Masters and Ph.D. degrees from The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA in 1986 and 1989, respectively. Prior to that, he received his B.Tech. degree in Electrical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay in 1984. Since 1989, he has been a faculty member at University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he also served as the Chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering from 2005—2009. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electronics and Electrical Engineers (IEEE). In addition to privacy, his research over the past 35 years have spanned the areas of real-time computing, fault-tolerance, wireless and sensor networks, and more recently bioinformatics.