Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has upended our societies and re-shaped the way we go about our day-to-day lives—from how we work and interact to the way we buy groceries and attend school. In this talk, I will present a series of studies exploring how our behavior, mobility patterns, and social networks have altered and been altered by COVID-19. Leveraging global data sets that represent billions of people, I will show how myriad factors interacted to shape the course of the pandemic. Using the lessons learned from COVID-19, I will discuss how we might balance the ethical and privacy considerations around high-resolution mobility data with their critical role in responding to epidemics.

• Video

• Slides

• Video

• Video

• Video

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the urgent need to develop reliable tools to forecast the trajectory of epidemics and pandemics in near real time. We describe and apply an ensemble n-sub-epidemic modeling framework for predicting the course of epidemics and pandemics. We systematically assess its calibration and short-term forecasting performance and compare it with other competitive statistical models. This sub-epidemic framework has demonstrated reliable forecasting performance in the context of COVID-19 and monkeypox epidemics.

• Video
• Slides

Abstract

Secure Multi-Party Computation (MPC) enables multiple entities to perform joint computations on their private data without exposing the data to one another. Since its introduction in the 1980s, MPC has been one of the most active research areas in cryptography, due in part to its wide applications and promising security guarantees. Over the last decade, MPC has gradually progressed from being purely of theoretical interest to being adopted more and more in practice. Yet, the adoption of MPC in real-world settings is still very limited as of today. In light of the recent data privacy legislations, there is an urgent need for bridging the gap between the theoretical feasibility and practical efficiency of MPC. Research in this area spans both theoretical and applied cryptography. In theory, we develop new techniques for achieving general MPC with the optimal complexity, bringing theory closer to practice. In practice, we design tailored MPC to achieve the best concrete efficiency for specific real-world applications. In this talk, I will discuss the challenges in both directions and how to overcome these challenges using cryptographic approaches.

• Video

• Video