Shufan Zhang

Bio: Shufan Zhang is a PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. His research interests include data privacy and security, on both theory and system aspects, as well as their intersections with database systems and machine learning. He has published in major data science conferences including SIGMOD, VLDB, ITCS, ICDCS, and journals such as IEEE TIT.

Talk Title: DProvDB: Differentially Private Query Processing with Multi-Analyst Provenance

Abstract: Recent years have witnessed the adoption of differential privacy (DP) in practical database systems like PINQ, FLEX, and PrivateSQL. Such systems allow data analysts to query sensitive data while providing a rigorous and provable privacy guarantee. However, the existing design of these systems does not distinguish data analysts of different privilege levels or trust levels. This design can have an unfair apportion of the privacy budget among the data analyst if treating them as a single entity, or waste the privacy budget if considering them as non-colluding parties and answering their queries independently. In this paper, we propose DProvDB, a fine-grained privacy provenance framework for the multi-analyst scenario that tracks the privacy loss to each single data analyst. Under this framework, when given a fixed privacy budget, we build algorithms that maximize the number of queries that could be answered accurately and apportion the privacy budget according to the privilege levels of the data analysts.