RISCS Co-Director Wins Award for Secure Multi-Party Computing Platform

Research Scientist and Co-Director of the Reliable Information Systems and Cyber Security (RISCS), Mayank Varia, has been awarded “Best Talk” at the University of Bristol’s Theory and Practice of Multi-Party Computation Workshops. The workshop took place April 3rd-7th at the University of Bristol’s campus in Bristol, England. Varia’s talk, “Design and Deployment of Usable, Scalable, MPC” focused on his work with Hariri Institute faculty and partners at UMass to develop a multi-party computing (MPC) platform that aggregates data input by Boston employers and looks at the pay-gap between their female and male employees.

The MPC technology has been applied through the Institute’s partnership with the Boston Women’s Workforce Council (BWWC), which aims to bring the light the pay gap between men and women, analyze the causes and problems, and move Boston toward becoming the best city in America for working women, as well as make Boston a leading, modern city.  The project, which began in 2013, announced a new partnership with BU in January, in which the BWWC will be housed at the Hariri Institute, which will allow faculty, including Varia, Hariri Institute Director Azer Bestavros and others, to continue work on collecting, securing, and later analyzing companies sensitive employee data for the council, while exploring new applications for the technology and platform.

Because pay and salary information is both sensitive to the employer and the employee, executives often feel as though they are at a crossroads between releasing such information and protecting company privacy. The multi-party computing platform will allow companies to feel more secure in releasing data to the BWWC as each level of information is secured. Participant companies will find low risk as the platform works to secure sensitive data and information away from other participants, so that each party’s respective information remains safe and anonymous. Companies, in essence, will be contributing data to a global workshop, as the data is used for both the BWWC and as an example in paving the way towards gender equity.

The collaboration will create a strong portfolio of the causes and effects of the pay-gap between men and women, as the BWWC works to make Boston one of the leading cities in equity, as well as quality of life. The Council and Initiative are some of the first and leading programs that work locally to make city-living better for all residents, especially women and those who are underrepresented.

Slides from Varia’s talk, as well as PhD candidates Sophia Yakoubov’s and Oxana Poburinnaya’s can be found here.

[More information on the BWWC’s work with the Hariri Institute]