[boonloo@gmail.com: DB Seminar, Fri 9/16 1:10pm, 380 Soda Hall]

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From: Boon Thau Loo <boonloo(at)gmail(dot)com>
Reply-To: boonloo(at)gmail(dot)com
To: dblunch(at)triplerock(dot)CS(dot)Berkeley(dot)EDU
Subject: DB Seminar, Fri 9/16 1:10pm, 380 Soda Hall

Friday, Sept 16, 2005
380 Soda Hall
1:10-2:30 pm

Title: "Querying Databases Privately"
Speaker: Johann-Christoph Freytag (DBIS, Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin)

Abstract:
Over the last years it has become apparent that privacy issues become more and
more important when accessing data sources either on the Web or by database
management systems. That is, the user does not only want to hide the query, but
also the result of that query from others. In the past the problem of querying
a database privately was solved by organizational rather than by technical
means. In this talk we describe the problem of querying databases privately
more formally and discuss existing solutions from the area of private
information retrieval (PIR). The lack of efficiency and scalability motivated
us look for alternative approaches using a so called "secure co-processor"
(built by IBM). We introduce a set of algorithms that take advantage of the
(physical) properties of the co-processor and show which algorithms are
necessary to guarantee privacy for database queries. Finally, we discuss
extensions of the basic algorithms at the same time showing that our approach
can be used for other (non-obvious and initially unrelated) problems as well.

Bio:
Johann-Christoph Freytag is a full professor in the area of databases and
information systems at Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin since 1994. He received
his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics/Computer Science from Harvard University in
1985. From 1985 until 1993 he worked in industry at the IBM Almaden Research
member (Starburst project), at the European Computer-Industry Research Centre
(ECRC), Munich, and Digital Equipment (DEC) Germany. He is the author of many
papers in the area of query processing and query optimization; for his work in
databases and Life Science he received several IBM Faculty Awards and one IBM
SUR Grant. As a member of the VLDB Endowment he organized VLDB2003 in Berlin.

Please note that you can get the list of scheduled speakers and also the slides
of previous talks this semester at http://db.cs.berkeley.edu/dblunch.html

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