The next WATCH talk, called Why the Census Bureau Adopted Differential Privacy for the 2020 Census of Population, from John M. Abowd, Chief Scientist and Associate Director for Research and Methodology at the U.S. Census Bureau, is Wednesday, June 6th 2018, Noon-1PM EST.
Dr. Abowd was the lead author of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) white paper on Privacy-Preserving Data Analysis for the Federal Statistical Agencies in January 2017.
John M. Abowd is Associate Director for Research and Methodology and Chief Scientist at the United States Census Bureau and the Edmund Ezra Day Professor of Economics, Professor of Statistics and Information Science at Cornell University. At the Census Bureau, he leads a directorate of research centers, each devoted to domains of investigation important to the future of social and economic statistics. At Cornell, his primary appointment is in the Department of Economics in the ILR School. His current research and many activities of the Labor Dynamics Institute (LDI) at Cornell focuses on the creation, dissemination, privacy protection, and use of linked, longitudinal data on employees and employers. In his earlier work at the Census Bureau he provided scientific leadership for the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics Program, which produces research and public-use data integrating censuses, demographic surveys, economic surveys, and administrative data. Prof. Abowd’s other research interests include network models for integrated labor market data; statistical methods for confidentiality protection of micro-data; international comparisons of labor market outcomes; executive compensation with a focus on international comparisons; bargaining and other wage-setting institutions; and the econometric tools of labor market analysis. Prof. Abowd served on the faculty at Princeton University, the University of Chicago, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before moving to Cornell.
Abstract
In September 2017, the Census Bureau announced, at a meeting of its Scientific Advisory Committee, that the test products from the 2018 End-to-End Census Test would be protected using differential privacy. The 2018 E2E test is the prototype of the full 2020 Census production system. Hence, unless the differential privacy system used for the 2018 E2E test fails, the expectation is that the full set of publication products from the 2020 Census will be protected by differential privacy. Importantly, the Bureau also indicated that the engineers implementing the 2018 E2E Test system and the 2020 Census production system would not be allowed to choose the privacy-loss budget, or make other decisions related to the allocation of that budget to different components of the privacy protection system. The decisions regarding the privacy-loss budget will be made by the Data Stewardship Executive Policy Committee (DSEP). This design ensures that the senior executive staff, and not the system engineers, will select the point on the privacy-loss, publication accuracy frontier that balances the dual mandates to produce data that are suitable for their intended uses and protective of the confidentiality of the respondents’ information.
The talk will be held in the new National Science Foundation building (Room 2030) at 2415 Eisenhower Ave. in Alexandria, VA 22314. The new security requirements require that everyone who enters the building have an entry badge, so please send an email to Cassandra Queen at cqueen@nsf.gov if you plan to attend.
See the webcast here.
