Jon Crowcroft - Privacy-preserving analytics in the cloud

13:00

Thursday

Dec

2017

Keynote Speech

Place:

IMAG Building Amphitheatre

Organized by:

L'équipe des Keynote Speeches : Sihem Amer-Yahia, Jérôme David, Renaud Lachaize

Speaker:

Jon Crowcroft, University of Cambridge, UK

Jon Crowcroft is the Marconi Professor of Communications Systems in the Computer Laboratory of the University of Cambridge and the Chair of the Programme Committee at the Alan Turing Institute. He joined the University of Cambridge in 2001, prior to which he was Professor of Networked Systems at University College London in the Computer Science Department. He is currently a Fellow at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge.

He has worked in the area of Internet support for multimedia communications for over 30 years. Three main topics of interest have been scalable multicast routing, practical approaches to traffic management, and the design of deployable end-to-end protocols.
Current active research areas are opportunistic communications, social networks, and techniques and algorithms to scale infrastructure-free mobile systems.
He leans towards a "build and learn" paradigm for research.
He likes teaching, and has published a few books based on learning materials.

He graduated in Physics from Trinity College, University of Cambridge in 1979, gained an MSc in Computing in 1981 and PhD in 1993, both from
UCL. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, a Chartered Fellow of the British Computer Society, a Fellow of the Institution of Electrical Engineers and a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, as well as a Fellow of the IEEE. He was a member of the Internet Architecture Board 96-02, and attended most of the first 50 IETF meetings. He was general chair for the ACM SIGCOMM conference between 1995 and 1999, and received the SIGCOMM Award in 2009.

This talk is about experience implementing machine learning in a fully decentralized way on low cost home devices, which can potentially lead to large improvements in privacy.
The two-sided market of Cloud Analytics emerged almost accidentally, initially from click-through associated with users’ response to search results, and then adopted by many other services, whether web mail or social media. The business model seen by the user is of a free service (storage and tools for photos, video, social media etc). The value to the provider is untrammeled access to the users' data over space and time, allowing upfront income from the ability to run recommenders and targeted adverts, to background market research about who is interested in what information, goods and services, when and where. The value to the user is increased personalisation. This all comes at a cost, both of privacy (and the risk of loss of reputation or even money) for the user, and at the price of running highly expensive data centers for the providers, and increased cost in bandwidth and energy consumption (mobile network costs & device battery life). The attack surface of our lives expands to cover just about everything.
This talk will examine several alternative directions that this will evolve in the future.