February 16, 2016, meetup agenda - privacy and big data analytics

We are very excited to have Csilla Farkas an Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and Director of the Center for Information Assurance Engineering at the Unviersity of South Carolina with as for our next meetup. She will be presenting on privacy issues in the context of big data analytics. An Abstract and more about Csilla can be found below.

Come out for a great talk, infosec fellowship, food, and adult beverages. We meet every third Tuesday at IT-ology at 6:15 p.m. Check out our directions page for how to get to IT-ology and the meeting room.

Abstract

This talk investigates the privacy issues in the context of big data analytics. The need to support data-driven decision making led to the development of sophisticated technologies to collect and analyze large data sets. However, this useful means of analyzing data comes at a cost: sensitive data may be disclosed and individuals' privacy may be violated.   Enterprises, organizations and government agencies collect and analyze vast amounts of data with and without the individuals' knowledge. Even if the raw data is properly sanitized, the result of the analysis may reveal information about specific individuals. Privacy preserving data mining methods have been developed to provide useful analytics without violating users' privacy.  However, these privacy preserving approaches are still limited with respect to the security problem when data mining results are combined with external knowledge to create security violations.  This talk shows some promising approaches that use semantic web technologies 1) to detect undesired inferences due to combining external knowledge with data mining results and 2) to enable individuals (data suppliers) to specify and evaluate privacy preferences in the context of big data analytics.

Bio

Csilla Farkas is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and Director of the Center for Information Assurance Engineering at the University of South Carolina .  Dr. Farkas’ research interests include information security, data inference problem, financial and legal analysis of cyber crime, and security and privacy on the Semantic Web.  She is a recipient of the National Science Foundation Career award.  The topic of her award is “Semantic Web: Interoperation vs. Security – A New Paradigm of Confidentiality Threats.”  Dr. Farkas actively participates in international scientific communities as program committee member and reviewer.

Csilla Farkas received her PhD from George Mason University, Fairfax.  In her dissertation she studied the inference and aggregation problems in multilevel secure relational databases.  She received a MS in computer science from George Mason University and BS degrees in computer science and geology from SZAMALK, Hungary and Eotvos Lorand University, Hungary, respectively.