Member of the UaESMC team defends her PhD thesis
Mar 26
Mar 26
Part of the work done in the UaESMC project has culminated in a PhD thesis. Liina Kamm's thesis titled "Privacy-preserving statistical analysis using secure multi-party computation" describes the algorithms and implementations of the statistical methods developed during the UaESMC project. The work focuses on how to perform statistical analyses in a way that preserves the privacy of the individual. Secure multi-party computation allows data to be analysed without seeing the individual values. Even though using secure multi-party computation is a time-consuming process, the thesis shows that it is feasible even for large-scale databases.
The work has been compiled into a statistical tool called Rmind that is similar to tools that statistical analysts are used to. This allows them to carry out studies on the data without having to know the details of the underlying cryptographic protocols.
The thesis is available here. The defence itself can be seen here. Two popularizing pieces (alas, in Estonian) can be found here and here.