Three-Toed Sloth

"Scalable Privacy-Preserving Record Linkage Using Similarity-based Indexing" (Next Week at the Statistics Seminar)

With great data comes great responsibility:

Peter Christen, "Scalable Privacy-Preserving Record Linkage Using Similarity-based Indexing"

Abstract: Privacy-preserving record linkage is concerned with the development of techniques that allow the scalable, automatic and accurate matching of individual records from disparate databases across organisations, such that no sensitive or confidential information needs to be revealed by the database owners, and the parties involved in the linkage only learn which records are classified as matches.

In this presentation I will provide some background on this topic, illustrate the challenges involved in privacy-preserving record linkage, and present novel scalable protocols for privacy-preserving record linkage that are based on the pre-calculation of similarity values by the database owners. Besides improved scalability compared to other approaches to privacy-preserving record linkage, the advantages of our protocols are that any similarity function (for strings, dates, ages, numbers, etc.) as well as any "blocking" function can be employed.

Place and time: Adamson Wing, Baker Hall, 4:30 to 5:30 pm on Thursday, 8 September 2011

As always, the talk is free and open to the public.

Enigmas of Chance