WP1 - Requirements Gathering

In order to have a focus on real long-term future applications, the project needs a representative set of problems to work on. The complexity of this task arises from the fact that we first need to have different communities recognizing that SMC exists and it can be used to solve their problems. This WP makes sure that the work in this project does not wander too far away from where the real uses are. 

This workpackage will provide the project with a representative set of sample problems to work on, 
derived from the identified real needs of respective communities. Together with each problem, we also obtain a set of performance requirements pertaining to the size of the problem, tolerable imprecisions and information leaks, and the time interval in which a solution must be delivered. When selecting the communities to contact, we aim for the diversity of the areas of activity, as well as the diversity in the kinds of computational problems arising in these communities where a privacy-preserving solution would make a difference. Additionally, the contacted communities should be good candidates for the early adoption of SMC. Currently, we envision contacting several communities from the following list. 

ICT and Telecommunications sector Besides being the expectedly most receptive to the possibilities of SMC, this sector can also may also use it for the management and operation of communications infrastructure, for increasing its throughput. 

Healthcare This sector obviously has a lot of privacy issues. Right now, we see at least two different areas for immediate application of SMC techniques. One is the aggregation of health data of many people for statistical (epidemiological) purposes. The other is the diagnosis of patients based on data kept in several healthcare institutions. 

Banking and financial sector In this sector, the SMC techniques may be useful for bidding and other activities for determining the “right” price of some article. 

State information and security systems The operation of a present-day society is dependent on the state of various kinds of infrastructure typically operated by private entities. The government 
has a legitimate interest in monitoring all this infrastructure to detect pending incidents and their 
likely effects, while the operators may not want to provide such level of access to anyone. SMC 
techniques may help for such monitoring. 

Agricultural sector In particular, we are interested in the possible uses of SMC by small farms or, more generally by a collection of small businesses selling their goods or services to much larger entities. These small businesses may use SMC to coordinate what kind of goods each of them should produce in order to maximize the quantity and the price they would be receiving for those.

Deliverable 1.1 - Capability model
Deliverable 1.2 - Requirements specification based on the interviews