SAIL Team Wins at Microsoft-Vivli Datathon
We are proud to announce that a team representing the Hariri Institute’s Software & Application Innovation Lab (SAIL) won the Outstanding Graduate Submission prize at the Microsoft-Vivli Datathon on June 21, 2019. Congratulations to team members Kinan Dak Albab, Megan Fantes, Peter Flockhart, Wyatt Howe, Lucy Qin, and Zack Zhang!
Microsoft and Vivli, a global clinical research data sharing platform, hosted the one-day datathon focused on data privacy and rare disease clinical trial sharing. Teams were tasked with figuring out how to safeguard privacy and minimize privacy loss for clinical trial participants while maintaining the scientific analytic value of the data collected through clinical trials, particularly in cases when the small size of the data makes participants highly identifiable. The Outstanding Graduate Submission was awarded to the team comprised primarily of graduate students.
The SAIL team proposed a solution combining secure multi-party computation (MPC) and differential privacy (DP) protocols, delivered through a web-based interface to protect private data. The model allows data providers to secretly share their data with a federated data-sharing platform for analysis. The platform computes the data using MPC, randomizes the output with DP, and reveals the answers to the user. The open source code is available here.
#Datathon participant @afantesyworld shares: "People in social science research fields do incredible things but struggle to get the numbers for their work. Data privacy has tools that we can build to make data sharing easier and more secure to make research more effective". pic.twitter.com/Dfg1RdS0Yu
— Vivli (@VivliCenter) June 21, 2019
Housed within the Hariri Institute for Computing, the Software & Application Innovation Lab (SAIL) is a professional research, software engineering, and consulting lab that acts as both a driver and a collaborative partner for computational and data-oriented research efforts across Boston University.