VILLUM grant for ITU project on privacy protection
Professor Andrzej Wąsowski receives DKK 2 million for an experimental research project that aims to increase privacy for users of digital technologies in the data-driven economy using new methods.
Computer Science DepartmentResearchdata storageIT securitygrantsAndrzej Wasowski
Written 10 September, 2018 08:09 by Vibeke Arildsen
The VILLUM Foundation’s Experiment grants go to original, high-risk research projects within tech and the natural sciences. Among this year’s recipients is Andrzej Wąsowski, Professor at ITU, who receives DKK 2 million for a project on privacy protection in the age of big data.
“I strongly believe that the data-driven economy is both a tremendous success that can move humanity forward, but also an extremely difficult challenge, as it makes our private lives a traded commodity. With this project, we are starting a line of work that attempts to reconcile the need for protecting privacy of users of all sorts of digital technologies, and the needs of businesses that want to capitalize on the data they collect,” he says.
If successful, the project could lead to new data-sharing practices in the industry.
“We want to work on tools that will help data scientists to assess how risky a data release is for the data subjects. This should help the industry to avoid naive mistakes, when privacy of users is compromised needlessly. It should also help to understand what are accepted risk levels, and good data sharing practices. The VILLUM Experiment project gives us the opportunity to try out our basic ideas, and if they prove promising, to expand this research agenda long term,” says Andrzej Wąsowski.
The official title of the project is ‘Assessment of Reidentification Risks with Bayesian Probabilistic Programing’.
Andrzej Wąsowski, Professor, phone +45 7218 5086, email wasowski@itu.dk
Vibeke Arildsen, Press Officer, phone 2555 0447, email viar@itu.dk