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[Colloquium] Privacy-preserving Data Aggregation over Participatory Networks

March 4, 2008

Watch Colloquium:


  • Date: Tuesday, March 4th, 2008 
  • Time: 11 am — 12:15 pm 
  • Place: ME 218

Wenbo He
PhD Candidate
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

The emerging participatory networked embedded systems, designed for aggregated information collection with fine-granularity, are viewed as new generation of pervasive computing systems. We expect both social and economic impact of participatory networks. Applications of participatory networks are likely to deal with highly sensitive or private information. Hence, one of the pressing concerns of users is the confidentiality of the data collected about them. Therefore, we need a way to collect aggregated information while at the same time preserve data privacy.

In this talk, I will present two privacy-preserving data aggregation schemes for additive aggregation functions. The first scheme, Cluster-based Private Data Aggregation (CPDA), leverages clustering protocol and algebraic properties of polynomials. It has the advantage of incurring less communication overhead. The second scheme, Slice-Mix-AggRegaTe (SMART), builds on slicing techniques and the associative property of addition. It has the advantage of incurring less computation overhead. The goal of this work is to bridge the gap between collaborative data collection and privacy preservation of individual data. I assess the two schemes by privacy-preservation efficacy, communication overhead, and data aggregation accuracy. Since both schemes trade message overhead for privacy, I will propose efficiency enhancement method for privacy preserving data aggregation when message overhead is a big concern. Finally, I will conclude this talk by discussing my future plan.

Bio: Wenbo He is a Ph.D. candidate in Department of Computer Science, at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she is supervised by Professor Klara Nahrstedt. Wenbo’s research focuses on pervasive computing, security and privacy issues in networked embedded systems. Wenbo received the Mavis Memorial Fund Scholarship Award from College of Engineering of UIUC in 2006, and the C. W. Gear Outstanding Graduate Award in 2007 from the Department of Computer Science at UIUC. She is also a recipient of Vodafone Fellowship from 2005 to 2008, and NSF TRUST Fellowship in 2007. Wenbo got her M.S. from Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UIUC and M.Eng. from Department of Automation at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 2000 and 1998 respectively. She received her B.S. from Department of Automation at Harbin Engineering University, Harbin, China in 1995. During August 2000 to January 2005, Wenbo was a software engineer in Cisco Systems, Inc.