Solving the Problems of Data Privacy with CIS Labs

Amanda Christensen, ideaXme guest contributor, fake news and deep fake researcher and Marketing Manager at Cubaka, interviews Ilan Komargodski, Ph.D., Researcher at the Cryptography & Information Security (CIS) Lab at NTT Research.

Amanda Christensen comments:

Data privacy has long been a topic of contention, and the importance of proper security protocols have never been more needed as we individuals, businesses, and governments have been forced to rapidly digitise everyday interactions as a part of lockdown and COVID-prevention procedures.

Recent events like the large-scale account hacking on Twitter, as well as heightened concerned over TikTok’s use of data have heightened these concerns in the public eye.

However, at present, there is little we can do to completely protect ourselves from giving up our personal information – if you want to access a website, flick through an app, get directions, or any number of the hundreds of minute tasks we perform digitally every day, you’re going to be giving up some degree of your personal data to do so.

But what if that didn’t need to be the case?

Ilan Komargodski, Ph.D.

To address this topic, I had the pleasure of speaking with Ilan Komargodski, Ph.D., Researcher at the Cryptography & Information Security (CIS) Lab at NTT Research.

As a part of the CIS Lab and NTT Research, Ilan and the CIS Lab team model various scenarios that are threatening data privacy and information security, and then use these models to design cryptography tools and protocols to protect user privacy.

With data privacy being a key concern across all sectors, the applications of their work is endless, and can help to facilitate technological innovation by reducing, or potentially eliminating, the key concern and barrier of privacy and information security.

Through methods like homomorphic encryption, the CIS Lab and NTT Research are also developing new ways to analyse and compute data without compromising data privacy.

Ilan started his career as a Software Engineer in the Israeli Army, leaving to pursue both an M.Sc. and Ph.D. at the Weizmann Institute of Science doing fundamental research in computer science with an emphasis on cryptography. Prior to joining NTT Research, Ilan was a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell Tech.

In this episode we will hear from Ilan about:

His background and how he developed an interest in computer science and cryptography. The research being undertaken in the three labs at NTT Research, as well as a deep dive into the the Cryptography & Information Security Lab. A top-level introduction to cryptography and homomorphic encryption.

This interview is in British English

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Credits: Amanda Christensen interview video, text, and audio.

If you liked this interview, be sure to check out our interview with Dan Mapes on the Spatial Web: Web 3.0!

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