The ASAP Team at INRIA Rennes is accepting applications for a full-time three-year PhD studentship within the context of the Gossple ERC project (www.gossple.fr) on the topic of "Privacy through decentralization".
The position has no teaching obligations. A good command of written and spoken English is a requirement. = JOB DETAILS AND APPLICATION = Successful candidates will sign a doctoral contract with INRIA Rennes for a three-year full-time position. Please contact Davide Frey and Anne-Marie Kermarrec as soon as possible if you are interested in the position. To apply, please send a motivation letter, a full CV, and a short list of references (contact information of your former/current professors/employers). You will be working at the INRIA Research Center registered at the doctoral school of the Universite' de Rennes 1. = PHD TOPIC = Title: ASAP - Privacy through decentralization Abstract: The ability to share data is one of the main reasons for the success of Internet applications, particularly in the context of the Web 2.0. The increasing availability of interconnected mobile devices prompts users to continuously share content such as comments, bookmarks, pictures, videos, as well as information about their physical location or social contacts. On the one hand, the availability of this data benefits people by enabling them to maintain contacts with each other, make new acquaintances, or discover new content. On the other hand, its personal nature also introduces a number of privacy concerns, which ultimately limit the amount of data that people are willing to share. It is in fact very hard, when not utterly impossible, for users to control exactly who their data is being shared with. The goal of this PhD is to investigate and explore the tradeoffs between services that employ shared information and the privacy guarantees that they can offer to users. Specifically, we will investigate how decentralized architectures and social trust can be combined with centralized and cloud designs in order to provide users with better control over their data. In this respect, we will start with a careful analysis of existing applications and of the data they operate on. This will guide us into the design of novel data-intensive applications that can operate while offering clear privacy guarantees to users when computing recommendations, or simply managing pictures and videos. Such a design will then set the basis for a further generation of systems capable of operating on even more sensitive data such as political ideas, or medical records keywords decentralization, privacy, big-data Short Bibliography Mohammad Alaggan, Sébastien Gambs, Anne-Marie Kermarrec: Private Similarity Computation in Distributed Systems: From Cryptography to Differential Privacy. OPODIS 2011: 357-377 Davide Frey, Arnaud Jégou, Anne-Marie Kermarrec: Social Market: Combining Explicit and Implicit Social Networks. SSS 2011: 193-207 Marin Bertier, Davide Frey, Rachid Guerraoui, Anne-Marie Kermarrec, Vincent Leroy: The Gossple Anonymous Social Network. Middleware 2010: 191-211 Antoine Boutet, Davide Frey, Rachid Guerraoui, Anne-Marie Kermarrec: WhatsUp: News, From, For, Through, Everyone. Peer-to-Peer Computing 2010: 1-2 Contacts : [email protected] [email protected] _______________________________________________ IEEE Communications Society Tech. Committee on Computer Communications (TCCC) - for discussions on computer networking and communication. [email protected] https://lists.cs.columbia.edu/cucslists/listinfo/tccc
