About me...

First, the basics: I'm a third year PhD student in the Computer Science Department at Purdue University; my advisor is Dr. Chris Clifton, and my research focuses on Differentially Private Datamining. In short, this is the trick of studying groups of people, and then publicly releasing the results of your study, while still protecting the privacy of the individuals in the group. This often requires pulling together concepts from algorithms, combinatorics, data-mining, machine learning, and statistics to provide provable mathematical guarantees that both the individuals will be safe and the released data will still be useful.

At Purdue, I'm a graduate student member of the NSF Center for the Science of Information(CoSI) and the Center for the Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS). I have previously worked at the Air Force Research Labs at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, and Sandia National Labs in Livermore, CA; this summer I will be working at the Naval Research Labs in Washington, DC. I am currently a visiting scholar at Howard University, where I assist in mentoring undergraduate computer science students through CoSI.

My undergraduate degree is in theoretical Math from Ohio State University, where I also earned minors in Physics, Computer Science, and History (and a few years experience in stage combat*). My M.S. in Computer Science is from Indiana University; while there, I enjoyed several years of teaching Discrete Math and Computability Theory to IU undergradaute computer science students, often in terms of pirates and pies.

I have two cats, one husband, one philodendren, a fuel-efficient car, a remarkably ugly suitcase that goes *everywhere*, and a lot of books.



Research

Statement

My research applies differential privacy to social network analysis and text-mining. My work focuses on restricting data-sets and queries to reduce their sensitivity to individuals' contributions, while still maintaining utility. Low-sensitivity queries can be privatized by adding noise to obfuscate individual influence on the query results.

Differential Privacy Tutorial

  • "A Practical Beginner's Guide to Differential Privacy" CERIAS Security Seminar, April 25th 2012. (slides, video)


    • Posters and Talks

  • "Generalized Network Privacy" 2013 CERIAS Symposium. ( poster )

  • "Outlink Privacy in Social Networks" 2012 CSOI NSF site-review. (poster)

  • "Parallelized Graph Triangle Sampling" 2012 Sandia National Labs Summer Intern Review (poster, slides )

  • "Defining Differential Privacy for Social Networks" 2012 DIMACS Workshop on Recent Work on Differential Privacy across Computer Science ( slides )

  • "Publicly Constrained Populations in Differential Privacy" 2012 CERIAS Symposium. (poster)

  • "Differentially Private Partitioned Graph-mining" 2011 CSOI NSF site-review. (poster)


    • Papers