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 […]

The next WATCH talk, called The Hidden Multi-Billion Dollar International Trade in Our Medical Data, from Adam Tanner, Author of “Our Bodies, Our Data:  How Companies Make Billions Selling Our Medical Records,” is Tuesday, May 1st 2018, Noon-1PM EST. Adam Tanner is a leading expert on the business of personal data and privacy. He is the author of Our Bodies, Our Data: How Companies Make Billions Selling Our Medical Records (2017) and What Stays in Vegas: The World of Personal Data – Lifeblood of Big Business – and the End of Privacy as We Know It.  He is an associate at Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, where he has been a fellow, writer and associate since 2011. He […]

The next WATCH talk, called Applications of Differential Privacy, from Dr. Rebecca Wright at Rutgers University, is Wednesday, March 28th, from 1:30PM-2:30PM. Dr. Rebecca Wright is a professor in the Computer Science Department and Director of DIMACS at Rutgers. Her research is primarily in the area of information security, including cryptography, privacy, foundations of computer security, and fault-tolerant distributed computing. Dr. Wright serves as an editor of the International Journal of Information and Computer Security and of the Transactions on Data Privacy, and is a member of the board of the Computer Research Association’s Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research (CRA-W). She received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Yale University, a […]

The next WATCH talk, called Server-Side Verification of Client Behavior, from Michael Reiter at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is Thursday, February 15th, from 12PM -1PM. Michael Reiter is the Lawrence M. Slifkin Distinguished Professor in the Department of Computer Science at UNC Chapel Hill. His research interests include all areas of computer and communications security, distributed computing, and networking. His professional responsibilities during his career so far have included Director of Secure Systems Research at Bell Labs; founding Technical Director of CyLab at Carnegie Mellon University; program chair for the flagship computer security conferences of the IEEE, the ACM, and the Internet Society; and Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Information and System Security, among others. Dr. […]

The next WATCH talk, called 35 Years of Cyberwar: The Squirrels are Winning is Thursday, July 20th, from 12 PM-1 PM ET. The presenter is Cris Thomas (aka Space Rogue) from IBM. Cris has an uncanny ability to link disparate events, read between the lines and distill complex, technical information into readily understandable, accessible and actionable intelligence. He and his colleagues created the first security research think tank, L0pht Heavy Industries, and the widely popular video news show The Hacker News Network. Eager to share his wealth of knowledge on security trends, Cris has testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, and has been interviewed by media organizations […]

The next WATCH talk, called Confidentiality à la Carte with Cipherbase is Thursday, June 22th, from 12 PM-1 PM ET. The presenter is Donald Kossmann, who is the director of the Microsoft Research Lab in Redmond. He joined Microsoft in 2014. Before that, he was a professor in the Systems Group of the Department of Computer Science at ETH Zurich (Switzerland). He is the Chair of ACM SIGMOD and an ACM Fellow. He is a co-founder of four start-ups in the areas of Web data management and cloud computing. Abstract: Organizations move data and workloads to the cloud because the cloud is cheaper, more agile, and more secure. Unfortunately, the cloud […]