CyLab Seminar - Adam Smith
November 16, 2026 12:00PM—1:00PM
Location:
In Person and Virtual - ET
-
Panther Hollow Conference Room 4105, Mehrabian Collaborative Innovation Center
Speaker:
ADAM SMITH - Postponed,
Professor of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering
Department of Computer Science
Boston University
https://cs-people.bu.edu/ads22/
Many of the richest sources of data about how we live come with a network structure, in which each record is associated to several people. I'll talk about recent advances and open directions in analyzing such data with rigorous privacy guarantees.
The talk will focus on three vignettes, ranging from pure theory to a practical case study: first, a recent, general algorithm for "stable contribution bounding" in network data—that is, for capping the degree in a network in a way that is robust to small changes; second, an impossibility result show that such capping is impossible in fully distributed settings; third, a study of how differentially private release of epidemiological data can enable research on disease modeling.
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Adam Smith is a professor of computer science at Boston University. He obtained his Ph.D. from MIT in 2004, and was a faculty member at Penn State from 2007 to 2017. His research interests lie in data privacy and cryptography, and their connections to machine learning, statistics, information theory, and quantum computing. His work received a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 2009; Test of Time awards in 2016 (TCC) and 2019 (Eurocrypt); the 2017 Gödel Prize; and the 2021 Kannelakis Award. He is a Fellow of the ACM.
In Person and Zoom Participation.
→ CyLab Seminars are open to CyLab Partners and current CMU faculty, staff and students.
For More Information:
bethbuch@andrew.cmu.edu