[talks] Starting Now: Udi Weinsberg Talk, Sherrerd 306: Building a Practical Privacy-Preserving Recommender System

[Joshua A. Kroll]

Udi Weinsberg of Technicolor will be speaking at 2:00pm on May 29, in Sherrerd 306.   His title and abstract are below.


Building a Practical Privacy-Preserving Recommender System

Many online services, such as recommender systems, email, and social networks collect user data, which is then used for both personalization and monetization. Although the latter enables services to be free, users are realizing that these services come at a hidden cost of potentially exposing their private data. In this talk I will show that even the common 5-star item-rating recommender system leaks private demographic information. Then, I will discuss methods for helping users preserve their privacy while getting accurate recommendations. Finally, a building block of many recommender systems, and an important machine-learning algorithm on its own, is linear regression. I will  present a system that learns a linear model without learning anything about the private input data other than the output model.