Monday April 18, 2005
12:30 – 1:30 p.m.
Room 230
Free and Open to all!
Lunch Served
Board a city bus, pass a bank building, or drive through a toll point - these are just a few ways that your daily trip to and from work can create a record about you in a database or on film. While the anonymity of non-suspicious routine activities is eroding, there is nothing inevitable about this development. This talk will be an overview of some current research projects exploring the grand challenge of today's engineers and IT developers -- integrating privacy and/or anonymity into the design of technology. Three areas of research will be presented. First, a set of privacy design principles for engineers and computer scientists will be presented. Second, in a case study on sharing video surveillance data, a new privacy-enabling algorithm, named k-Same, will also be demonstrated. This algorithm guarantees face recognition software cannot reliably recognize de-identified faces, even though many facial details are preserved. Third is an overview of a mental models approach to help in understanding potential public attitudes and awareness towards privacy and recent changes in technology.Elaine Newton is a doctoral candidate in the Engineering and Public Policy
Department at Carnegie Mellon University and has been a researcher for the
RAND Corporation since 1999. Her dissertation research focuses on
developing technology and policy design principles that preserve anonymity
and privacy, expanding upon the US doctrine of Fair Information Practices
and the OECD Guidelines on the Protection of Privacy and Transborder Flows
of Personal Data. Her research also seeks to understand the mental model
framework of the general public for assessing privacy and security risks.
Ms. Newton works with the CMU Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory (CUPS
Lab). Her work at RAND includes co-authoring Army Biometric
Applications: Identifying and Addressing Sociocultural Concerns and
working with DARPA's Human ID at a Distance Program.
Before joining RAND, Ms. Newton served a one year appointment to Columbia
University's Center for Science, Policy, and Outcomes in Washington, DC (now
known as the Consortium for Science,Policy&Outcomes) as a researcher and
associate general manager. Previously, she also worked in the environmental
engineering field at the Quaker Oats Company, Law Engineering and
Environmental Services, and RUST Environment and Infrastructure. Her
general research interests are in the field of Science and Technology
Policy.
Ms. Newton holds a Masters from CMU's Engineering and Public Policy
Department and a B.S. from Georgia Tech in Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
(with a minor in Science Policy). She is a member of the Institute of
Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) as well as the IEEE Committee on
Communications and Information Policy.
She blogs at the CIS blog site.
Her CMU website can be found here.