Privacy Preservation in Social Networks

Speaker:	Dr. Jian PEI
		Associate Professor
		Director, Collaborative Research and Industry Relations
		School of Computing Science
		Simon Fraser University, Canada

Title:		"Privacy Preservation in Social Networks"

Date:		Wednesday, 15 April, 2009

Time:		4:00pm - 5:00pm

Venue:		Lecture Theatre F
		(Leung Yat Sing Lecture Theatre, near lifts 25/26)
		HKUST

Abstract:

ABSTRACT
Privacy in social network data becomes an important concern since recently
more and more social network data has been published in one way or
another.  In this talk, I will present our recent studies on privacy
preservation in publishing social network data.  With some local knowledge
about individuals in a social network, an adversary may attack the privacy
of some victims easily.  Unfortunately, most of the previous studies on
privacy preservation can deal with relational data only, and cannot be
applied to social network data.  We take an initiative towards preserving
privacy in social network data.  We identify an essential type of privacy
attacks: neighborhood attacks. If an adversary has some knowledge about
the neighbors of a target victim and the relationship among the neighbors,
the victim may be re-identified from a social network even if the victim's
identity is preserved using the conventional anonymization techniques.  We
show that the problem is challenging, and present a practical solution to
battle neighborhood attacks. The empirical study indicates that anonymized
social networks generated by our method can still be used to answer
aggregate network queries with high accuracy.


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Biography:

Jian Pei is currently an Associate Professor and the director of
Collaborative Research and Industry Relations at the School of Computing
Science at Simon Fraser University. His research interests can be
summarized as developing effective and efficient data analysis techniques
for novel data intensive applications. He has published prolifically in
refereed journals, conferences, and workshops. He is an associate editor
of IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering. He has served
regularly in the organization committees and the program committees of
many international conferences and workshops, and has also been a reviewer
for the leading academic journals in his fields. He is a senior member of
the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Institute of
Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). He is the recipient of the
British Columbia Innovation Council 2005 Young Innovator Award, an NSERC
2008 Discovery Accelerator Supplements Award, an IBM Faculty Award (2006),
and the KDD'08 Best Application Paper Award.