Computer Science Faculty Receive Award from the U.S. Census

The U.S. Census Bureau awarded Computer Science faculty Assistant Professor Mark Bun (Co-PI), Assistant Professor Marco Gaboardi (PI), and Professor Adam Smith (co-PI) with a cooperative agreements that looks at improving survey practices and adjusting privacy methods on Thursday, September 17 2020. Their project, Towards an End-to-End Approach to Formal Privacy for Sample Surveys, is a multi-institution project led by Boston University and involving Harvard University, Georgetown University, and University of Maryland. Their efforts were awarded with a total of $3.7 million, with $1.5 million allocated to Boston University specifically.

The award given to BU is one of three cooperative agreements recognized by the U.S. Census Bureau. Principal investigator Gabpardi and his colleagues have made several contributions to the data privacy field, such as the practice and theory of differential privacy and the analysis of data protection using multiple imputation. The research conducted by Bun, Gaboardi, and Smith explains methods for how to improve upon a researcher’s understanding of common survey practices, such as weighting adjustments and stratification, and how these methods relate to privacy guarantees. Further, they looked at ways to modify current privacy practices to support smaller sample sizes. Due to the fact that re-identification is a valid risk researchers face when dealing with large and detailed databases, their project will work to develop a formal privacy technique meant to protect survey respondents.

Paul Beatty, Chief of the Center for Behavioral Science Methods for the U.S. Census, writes, “their work in collaboration with the Census Bureau will help pave the way for provable privacy guarantees for survey respondents, not just for Census Bureau surveys, but also for surveys across the federal statistical system and beyond,” summarizing the extraordinary research of Bun, Gaboardi, and Smith and their team.