ECE Colloquium: Alex Sprintson

ECE Colloquium: Alex Sprintson

Title: “Personal Computation: Algorithms, Fundamental Limits, and Applications”

Abstract: We focus on Private Computation, a framework that enables users to evaluate functions over remotely stored data while concealing sensitive aspects of the request, including the computation being performed and the specific data items involved. We review several key information-theoretic privacy notions: functional privacy, which hides the coefficients of the requested linear combination; joint support privacy, which conceals the complete set of participating data items; and individual support privacy, which protects each data item independently. We conclude by discussing how Private Linear Computation (PLC) can serve as a fundamental primitive for enabling privacy-preserving statistical inference and machine learning over remotely stored data.

Bio: Alex Sprintson is a professor and Chair in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, George Mason University, where he conducts research on security and privacy, network coding, and distributed storage systems. Dr. Sprintson is an IEEE Fellow. His recognitions include the TAMU College of Engineering Outstanding Contribution Award and the NSF CAREER award. From 2013 to 2019, he served as an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications. He has been a member of the Technical Program Committee for IEEE Infocom from 2006 to 2023 and served as a co-chair in 2024. From Aug. 2005 to Aug. 2025, he was on the Faculty of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX. From 2018 to 2022, Dr. Sprintson served as a rotating program director at the US National Science Foundation (NSF), leading the Resilient & Intelligent NextG Systems (RINGS) and Reliable and Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) programs. From Oct. 2022 to Dec. 2023, Dr. Sprintson served as the Network Security Principal at Nokia-Bell Labs, leading a research team focused on post-quantum cryptography and crypto-agility.