Privacy in Context

July 20, 2015
Benjamin Zorn and Jaeyeon Jung | Microsoft, Microsoft Research

Big data equals Big Brother? The big data explosion forces us to confront the privacy implications of this wide-ranging societal change. In this session, we will talk about privacy-related efforts: both in Microsoft Research and in academia. What does privacy means in the context of always-on sensors such as Kinect? What happens to parents and teenagers living in Internet-connected homes? How do we sanitize documents on a large scale? How can we quantify privacy and privacy loss? These topics and others will be discussed with the goal of creating shared understanding as well as collaborative research opportunities.

Speaker Details

Ben Zorn is a Research Manager and Principal Researcher, co-managing the Research in Software Engineering (RiSE) group, a group of over 30 researchers and developers working on programming languages and software engineering in Microsoft Research, Redmond. After receiving a PhD in Computer Science from UC Berkeley in 1989, he served eight years on the Computer Science faculty at the University of Colorado in Boulder, receiving tenure and being promoted to Associate Professor in 1996. Dr. Zorn left the University of Colorado in 1998 to join Microsoft Research, where he currently works. His research interests include programming language design and implementation for reliability, security, and performance. Dr. Zorn has served as both Program Chair (1999) and General Chair (2010) of the PLDI conference, as an Associate Editor of the ACM journals Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems and Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization. He has also served seven years as a Member-at-Large of the SIGPLAN Executive Committee and four years as a member of the ACM Software Systems Award Committee. He is currently a member of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council, a committee of the Computing Research Association.

Jaeyeon Jung is a researcher at Microsoft Research. Prior to joining Microsoft, she was a research scientist at Intel Labs Seattle (2007–2011) after a brief stint as a software architect at Mazu networks (2006–2007). She obtained her PhD from MIT in 2006. Her current research focuses on developing new technologies for protecting consumer privacy, particularly in the areas of mobile systems and emerging consumer devices for the home.