Institute Director Presents on Multi-Party Computation at Harvard
Hariri Institute Founding Director, Azer Bestavros, presented at Harvard University as part of the 2016 Dataverse Community Meeting. The privacy workshop component of the annual meeting, titled “Managing Privacy in Research Data Repositories,” focuses on tools that help to open repositories currently addressing sensitive or private data, and was held at Harvard Medical School on July 13th. Bestavros participated in the “Solutions: Software Tools for Managing Privacy” session, where he discussed the Institute’s work with secure multi-party computation software.
This type of computation software allows “groups of cooperating parties, such as companies or other organizations, to perform computation over their respective data assets for the purpose of obtaining aggregate analytics without the need to communicate or share their private data sets.” Most recently, Bestavros and collaborators, Andrei Lapets, Nikolaj Volgushev, Mayank Varia, Eric Dunton, Kyle Holzinger, and Frederick Jansen, utilized the technology to support a gender gap study by the Women’s Workforce Council. Funded in part by NSF awards #1414119 and #1430145 and by the Initiative on Cities at Boston University, the group was able to collect sensitive salary information from employers in the Boston area and create a aggregate picture of all the data without releasing any company names.