Scientific Data Division Summer Students Tackle Data Privacy
Ammar Haydari, a Ph.D. student at the University of California Davis, and a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) Affiliate grew up in Istanbul, Turkey, the eldest child in a big family where scientific exploration was always encouraged. He sees his parents’ encouragement as instrumental in getting him to where he is now.
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“I am tremendously impressed with what Ammar produced over the past couple of years,” noted Peisert. “We had a problem where important data wasn’t available for research purposes because it contained personally identifiable information and so couldn’t be handed out to researchers, even with the proper legal agreements. Ammar has developed and demonstrated a technical solution that enables this type of research to continue by addressing the privacy concerns while maintaining the usefulness of the data.”
Nikhil Ravi, a Ph.D. student at Cornell Tech and a Berkeley Lab Affiliate, attributes his love for research and dedication to science to his high school chemistry teacher. Later, in his undergraduate years, he found math invigorating and was particularly fond of probability theory. “That class shook me out of complacency. I realized the need to change my approach since I had dreams of higher education,” said Nikhil. “The professor really shed light on what was expected from Ph.D. candidates and emphasized the need for mathematical rigor.”
Ravi is advised by Professor Anna Scaglione, a long-time close collaborator of Peisert’s. At Berkeley Lab, Nikhil has been supporting a threat mitigation project by producing results that enable an analysis of electrical grid smart meter data to detect cyberattacks and applying differential privacy to preserve the confidentiality of the underlying data.