SaTC: CORE: Small: New Techniques for Optimizing Accuracy in Differential Privacy Applications

差异隐私是保护隐私和机密性的现代工具包中的一个重要进步。它允许政府机构和私人公司等组织收集数据并发布有关数据的统计数据，而不会泄露个人信息--无论攻击者有多老练。该项目的创新之处在于精心设计了新的不同于私人的工具，这些工具在提供更准确的人口统计数据的同时，保持了强大的隐私保障。该项目的影响在于能够在不牺牲个人隐私的情况下为社会科学和政策研究创建数据集。该项目包括研究生和本科生。该项目背后的技术想法是，仔细分析许多不同私有算法的隐私证明，可以识别可以在不改变隐私保证的情况下发布的额外(噪声)信息。除此之外，在差分私有算法的不同阶段之间相关的噪声可以进一步降低最终结果的方差。这些技术将允许较小的组织优化其隐私保护算法的准确性以用于实际部署，并通过替换具有更高准确性并允许他们更好地利用背景知识的构建块来定制现有算法。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Differential Privacy is an important advance in the modern toolkit for protecting privacy and confidentiality. It allows organizations such as government agencies and private companies to collect data and publish statistics about it without leaking personal information about people -- no matter how sophisticated an attacker is. The project's novelties are in the careful design of new differentially private tools that provide more accurate population statistics while maintaining strong privacy guarantees. The project's impacts are in the ability to create datasets for social science and policy research without sacrificing privacy of individuals. The project includes both graduate and undergraduate students in this research. The technical ideas behind this project are that a careful analysis of privacy proofs for many differentially private algorithms can identify additional (noisy) information that can be released without changing the privacy guarantees. In addition to this, noise that is correlated between different stages of a differentially private algorithm can further reduce the variance of the final result. These techniques will allow smaller organizations to optimize the accuracy of their privacy preserving algorithms for practical deployment, and customize existing algorithms by swapping in building blocks that have more accuracy and that allow them to take better advantage of background knowledge.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.