Associate Professor of Computer Science
Joined department in 2001
Education:
PhD, Computer Science
Princeton University (1991)
MA, Computer Science
Princeton University (1988)
BS, Computer Science and Engineering
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1986)
MS, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1986)
Dr. Clifton works on challenges posed by novel uses of data mining technology, including
privacy-preserving data mining, data mining of text, and data mining techniques applied to
interoperation of heterogeneous information sources. Fundamental data mining challenges posed by
these applications include extracting knowledge from noisy data, identifying knowledge in highly
skewed data (few examples of "interesting" behavior), and limits on learning. He also works on
database support for widely distributed and autonomously controlled information, particularly
information administration issues such as supporting fine-grained access control.
Prior to joining Purdue, Dr. Clifton was a principal scientist in the Information Technology Division
at the MITRE Corporation. Before joining MITRE in 1995, he was an assistant professor of computer
science at Northwestern University.
Selected Publications
Jaideep Vaidya, Chris Clifton, and Michael Zhu, "Privacy Preserving Data Mining", Volume 19 in
Advances in Information Security, Springer, New York, 2006, (
url).
Wei Jiang and Chris Clifton, "A Secure Distributed Framework for Achieving k-Anonymity",
The VLDB
Journal, VLDB Endowment, 15(4), VLDB Endowment, November 2006 (
url).
Murat Kantarcioglu and Chris Clifton, "Privacy Preserving Data Mining of Association Rules on
Horizontally Partitioned Data",
Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, Volume 16,
No. 9, pp. 1026-1037, IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA, September 2004, (
url).
Funding Administered by Computer Science
David Ebert, Christopher Clifton, William Cleveland, Timothy Collins, Edward Delp, Ahmed K.
Elmagarmid, and Mourad Ouzzani, Purdue University Regional Visualization and Analytics
Center, Battelle Memorial Institute, 1/3/2006-12/31/2008.
Elisa Bertino and Christopher Clifton, I3P:Assessable Identity and Privacy Protection,
Dartmouth College, 4/1/2007-3/31/2009.
Elisa Bertino, Christopher Clifton, Ninghui Li, and Eugene Spafford, A Framework for Managing the
Assured Information Sharing Lifecycle, MURI Program, 5/1/2008-4/30/2013.
Last Updated: November 24, 2008 10:03am
