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How data science will change our world - for better or for worse

Faculty Research Seminar

Speaker: Thomas Strohmer, UC Davis
Location: Zoom Zoom
Start time: Tue, Feb 15 2022, 12:10PM

Data science and artificial intelligence play an increasingly important key role in successfully tackling many of the grand challenges our society is facing over the coming years. In the first part of my talk I
will give a brief overview of some of my recent activities in this field. I will then discuss in more detail my ongoing project on the mathematics of data privacy and synthetic data. The goal of synthetic
data is to preserve meaningful statistical information about the dataset, but without risk of exposing private information. Synthetic data are expected to have great potential in areas such as health care,
where patient data are protected by privacy laws. But can we even construct synthetic data that are simultaneously private and accurate? And what do privacy and accuracy actually mean in this
context? Trying to answer these questions rigorously leads to deep mathematical challenges, as the road to privacy is paved with NP-hard problems! I will introduce various mathematical concepts of privacy and utility and discuss associated privacy-utility tradeoffs. I will then present some of our recent breakthroughs in the NP-hard challenge of the computationally efficient creation of synthetic data that come with provable privacy and utility guarantees. To prove these results, we draw from a wide range of mathematical concepts, including Boolean Fourier analysis, duality, functional analysis, empirical processes, and high-dimensional probability. I will conclude by discussing applications
of synthetic data arising in the Intensive Care Unit.



This meeting will be on Zoom: https://ucdavis.zoom.us/j/96864394419?pwd=REppQWJK... Meeting ID: 968 6439 4419 Passcode: 631425