YINS Distinguished Lecturer Series

“Safeguarding Privacy in Sequential Decision-Making Problems”

Speaker: John Tsitsiklis

Clarence J. Lebel Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT

Wednesday, April 10, 2019 – 12:00pm

Yale Institute for Network Science | 17 Hillhouse Avenue, 3rd floor | New Haven, CT 06511

Abstract: With the increasing ubiquity of large-scale surveillance and data analysis infrastructures, privacy has become a pressing concern in many domains. We propose a framework for studying a fundamental cost vs. privacy tradeoff in dynamic decision-making problems. More concretely, we are interested in ways that an agent can take actions that make progress towards a certain goal, while minimizing the information revealed to a powerful adversary who monitors these actions. We will examine two well-known decision problems (path planning and active learning), and in both cases establish sharp tradeoffs between obfuscation effort and level of privacy. As a byproduct, our analysis also leads to simple yet provably optimal obfuscation strategies. Based on joint work with Kuang Xu (Stanford) and Zhi Xu (MIT).

Speaker bio: John Tsitsiklis is the Clarence J. Lebel Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He obtained his PhD from MIT and joined the faculty in 1984. His research focuses on the analysis and control of stochastic systems, including applications in various domains, from computer networks to finance. He has been teaching probability for over 15 years.

You are invited to attend the 6th annual Yale Day of Data on November 30 in Sterling Memorial Library.

The Yale Day of Data brings together researchers and data experts from across the disciplines to share experiences, challenges, and best practices related to data-intensive research. If you collect, manage, analyze, interpret, or otherwise work with data, this event is for you.

This year’s theme, “Data on Earth,” is intentionally broad, to encompass data about the Earth and the environment, data that help us understand the health and lives of Earth’s inhabitants, and data with global impact.

Keynote: William Michener (Principal Investigator of DataONE, Professor and Director of e-Science Initiatives, University Libraries, University of New Mexico), “Managing Data Throughout the Research Life Cycle to Enable New Science and Support Decision Making”

Talks by Yale faculty and researchers: Tracey Meares, Dena
Schulman-Green, Karen Seto, Alan Gerber, Jessi Cisewski, Casey King, Martin Wainstein & Sophie Janaskie

Registration is now open for the 2018 Yale Day of
Data:https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/dayofdata/2018/.