Graduation and plans
May 20, 2009 at 6:35 am 3 comments
I defended my Ph.D thesis earlier this month, and I will soon be starting as a post-doctoral researcher at Stanford supervised by Dan Boneh. I’m very excited! I will still work on data anonymity, but it will not be my sole research focus.
Here is the introductory chapter to my thesis, formatted as a stand-alone document. I expect it to be useful mainly as a glossary and a very brief survey of data collection and sharing. It explains why non-interactive data sharing is popular and why anonymization is so tempting as a privacy protection mechanism.
As you can see, the chapter is less than 4 pages long, excluding references; the rest of my thesis consists of my papers concatenated together. Fortunately, the doctoral dissertation is generally treated as a formality in Computer Science, a fact that I am very grateful for since a dissertation is a stupendously inefficient way of communicating research results. I’m glad that my committee members made my life easy, while also providing useful comments on my defense talk.
I presented the social network de-anonymization paper at the S&P conference today at Oakland. Email me for the slides.
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33 Bits of Entropy 
1.
Bart Cart | May 25, 2009 at 9:49 am
I’m glad you won’t be dropping the subject of data anonimity. Too many people completely change their are of expertise once they start post-doctoral stuff.
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Sean | September 10, 2009 at 6:03 pm
I don’t think this is really true. Many people in CS spend effort on their theses, and they are often good introductions to the field. Plus, I think it is useful for PhD students to get a broader perspective. I am not criticizing your dissertation, but I disagree with calling it a formality.
3.
Arvind | September 11, 2009 at 3:16 am
Let me rephrase that. While it’s true that many people try to write meaningful theses, most CS departments and advisors seem to be fine with students treating it as a formality.
Believe me, I’m all about the broader perspective. (I’m actually working on a survey now that tries to unite many threads of research in disparate fields under a single umbrella.) But again, I think that for most people the thesis is a poor avenue for saying actually useful things, because you are typically laboring under the constraint of somehow making it a superset of your papers.