Lisa Singh gives talk at DC Data Science Meetup

Lisa Singh gives talk at DC Data Science Meetup entitled "Helping Users Understand Their Web Footprint".

Runner-up for Best Paper of ASONAM'15

Our paper "Public Information Exposure Detection: Helping Users Understand Their Web Footprints" got runner-up for Best paper of ASONAM'15.

ASONAM paper to appear

This paper helps users to understand their web footprints via public information exposure detection and analysis. We introduce methods for determining the amount of information that can be ascertained using only publicly accessible data.

WWW paper to appear

This paper introduce a novel information exposure detection framework that generates and analyzes the web foot prints users leave across the social web.

Andrew Hian-Cheong defends Thesis

Andrew Hian-Cheong defends Undergraduate Senior Thesis entitled " Building Web Footprints using Semantic Similarity".

Janet Zhu defends Thesis

Janet Zhu defends Undergraduate Senior Thesis entitled " Generating Recommendations to Reduce Identifiability of Public Online Profiles".

PIR 2014 workshop to be held.

The 1st International Workshop on Privacy-preserving IR (PIR 2014) to be held in SIGIR 2014.

PASSAT paper to appear

This paper analyzes the predictive accuracy of existing and ensemble inference algorithms to infer hidden attributes using publicly exposed attribute-value.

PST paper to appear

This paper is based on John Ferro's undergraduate senior thesis work. It focuses on a methodology for determining how vulnerable individuals in a pre-released data set are to re-identication using public data.

Three SIGIR Papers to appear

Our team is trying to understand different aspects of session search. These techniques will be the foundation of the text component of our inference engine.

WebFootprinting team awarded NSF grant

NSF awards grant to Singh, Sherr and Yang entitled "Assessing Online Information Exposure Using Web Footprints." The grant will begin in January 2013. The grant focuses on helping users better understand the potential risks associated with publishing certain data on the web, this project focuses on helping individuals determine and understand their WebFootprints.

Frank Nagle defends Master's Thesis

Frank Nagle successfully defends his Master's thesis entitled "Efficient Anonymization of Vulnerable Individuals in Social Networks". The thesis proposes a local anonymization algorithm that focuses on obscuring structurally important nodes that are not well anonymized. It also explores the underlying anonymity inherent in the topological structure of online social networks to better understand which parts are not well anonymized and extends a known measure for assessing the level of anonymization in a network to consider nodes that are more important than others. Part of this thesis work has already been presented at PAKDD 2012.

Aditi Ramachandran receives Best Student Paper Award

Aditi Ramachandran wins best student paper award at PST 2012 for paper entitled "Exploring re-identification risks in public domains." This work presents two different cases studies for sensitive data reidentification and then considers methods for agencies such as the Census Bureau to identify variables that cause individuals to be vulnerable without testing all combinations of variables.

John Ferro defends Undergraduate Senior Thesis

John Ferro successfully defends his Undergraduate's Thesis entitled "Identifying Individual Vulnerability Based on Public Data - A Senior Thesis". This thesis introduces a methodology for determining how vulnerable individuals in a pre-released data set are to re-identication using public data.