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SUMMARY:IC Colloquium: Privacy at Scale
DTSTART:20260212T101500
DTEND:20260212T111500
DTSTAMP:20260916T082326Z
UID:f89b7ee1d95a693ffbd97593980184d2fc688ffe74b5092257ee3df7
CATEGORIES:Conferences - Seminars
DESCRIPTION:By: Alexandra Henzinger - MIT\nIC Faculty candidate\n\nAbstrac
 t\nToday\, we have no choice but to entrust digital services with our data
 : our queries\, clicks\, prompts\, and much more. In doing so\, we leave b
 ehind a digital footprint that reveals where we go\, what we care about\, 
 and who we are. Users pay the price for this lack of privacy\; our data is
  exposed to thousands of parties\, resold for profit\, trained on\, or sto
 len by attackers. \n\nThis talk argues that digital services need not com
 e at the cost of our privacy. As a step towards this goal\, I will describ
 e the design of a search engine that learns nothing about what its users a
 re searching for. Building and scaling such a privacy-protecting system re
 quires changes across the stack: from system architecture\, to algorithms\
 , to cryptographic operations. The result is the first system that can pri
 vately search over hundreds of millions of webpages in seconds\, and whose
  core techniques have seen adoption in Apple’s iOS (“Enhanced Visual S
 earch”). \n\nBio\nAlexandra Henzinger is a Ph.D. student in the Paralle
 l and Distributed Operating Systems group at MIT\, advised by Henry Corrig
 an-Gibbs. Her research builds computer systems that deliver privacy and se
 curity at scale. Alexandra has received an NSF GRFP fellowship\, an MIT E
 ECS Great Educators fellowship\, and was selected as a 2024 EECS Rising St
 ar. Her work has been invited to the Journal of Cryptology.\n\nMore infor
 mation\n 
LOCATION:BC 420 https://plan.epfl.ch/?room==BC%20420 https://epfl.zoom.us/
 j/68862918402
STATUS:CONFIRMED
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