Creating a Platform for the Sharing of Sensitive Online Data

David Choffnes is an Assistant Professor in the College of Computer and Information Science at Northeastern University. Before joining Northeastern, he was a postdoctoral research associate in Professor Tom Anderson’s group at the University of Washington. Professor Choffnes earned his PhD in Computer Science from Northwestern University in 2010, and graduated from Amherst College, magna cum laude, in 2002 with a double-major in physics and French. Dr. Choffnes was awarded the Computing Innovation Fellowship to support his postdoctoral work. His Ph.D. dissertation won the 2009/2010 Outstanding Dissertation in EECS at Northwestern University, where he was also awarded two Cabell Fellowships. While working for Deitel & Associates from 2002-2004, he co-authored two textbooks and contributed to a third. His research has been covered by popular press including the Boston Globe, NBC News, CS Monitor, Science Magazine, the MIT Tech Review, Chronicle of Higher Education and Ars Technica. His work is supported by the NSF, Measurement Lab, Google Research, the Data Transparency Lab, and DHS S&T.

Mercè Crosas is Harvard University’s Research Data Officer, with the Office of Vice Provost for Research (OVPR), and Chief Data Science and Technology Officer at Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS). At IQSS, Dr. Crosas guides the vision and strategic direction of data sharing and data analysis projects developed at the Institute. She has led the Dataverse project, an open source software platform for sharing and archiving research data, since 2006. She now, also, leads the development of the text analysis tool Consilience, the DataTags project for sharing sensitive data, and supervises the user experience, data curation, and data science services teams.

Julia Lane is a Professor at the NYU Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, at the NYU Center for Urban Science and Progress, and a NYU Provostial Fellow for Innovation Analytics. She cofounded the Coleridge Initiative, whose goal is to use data to transform the way governments access and use data for the social good through training programs, research projects and a secure data facility. The approach is attracting national attention, including the Commission on Evidence Based Policy and the Federal Data Strategy.

Margaret Levenstein is the director of Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) and Executive Director of Michigan Federal Statistical Research Data Center. An economist, Levenstein first joined ISR’s Survey Research Center (SRC) in 2003 as the executive director of the Michigan Census Research Data Center (MCRDC), a joint project with the U.S. Census Bureau. She has taken an active role at ISR, joining the Director’s Advisory Committee on Diversity in 2009 and serving as the chair of ISR’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion strategic planning committee and as the liaison to the larger university program.

John Manferdelli is Professor of the Practice and Executive Director of the Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute at Northeastern University. Immediately prior to that he was Engineering Director for Production Security Development at Google. Prior to Google, John was a Senior Principal Engineer at Intel Corporation and co-PI (with David Wagner) for the Intel Science and Technology Center for Secure Computing at the University of California at Berkeley. He was also a member of the Information Science and Technology advisory group at DARPA and is a member of the Defense Science Board.

Michelle N. Meyer, PhD, JD, is an Assistant Professor and Associate Director, Research Ethics, in the Center for Translational Bioethics and Health Care Policy at Geisinger, a large, integrated health system in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. She is also Faculty Co-Director of the Behavioral Insights Team in Geisinger’s new Steele Institute for Health Innovation, which both designs, implements, and rigorously evaluates the effects of provider- and patient-facing “nudges” in the field and investigates stakeholder attitudes towards health nudges. She uses mixed methods to investigate judgments and decision-making among stakeholders in research and healthcare, including research participants, IRBs, health care providers, and patients.

Markus Mobius is a Principal Research at Microsoft Research. He was formerly an Associate Professor of economics at Harvard University. He received his PhD from MIT in 2000 and previously earned an M.Phil in economics and a B.A. in mathematics from Oxford University. His main research agenda deals with the economics of social networks. On the theory side, Markus builds models of learning, coordination and cooperation within social networks. He is particularly interested in how social networks can generate trust. On the empirical side, he uses a combination of lab and field experiments with real social networks to estimate these models. In a second line of research, Markus has explored how people manage their self-confidence when ego is at stake. Recently, he has used browsing data to analyze the economics of online news consumption.

Amy O’Hara is a research professor in the Massive Data Institute at Georgetown University, and the Director of Georgetown’s Federal Statistical Research Data Center. She also leads the Administrative Data Research Initiative, improving secure, responsible data access for research and evaluation. O’Hara addresses risks involved with data sharing by connecting practices across the social, health, computer, and data sciences. She was previously a senior executive at the U.S. Census Bureau where she founded their administrative data curation and research unit. O’Hara has published on topics including the measurement of income, longitudinal linkages to measure economic mobility, and the data infrastructure necessary to support government and academic research. Her current research focuses on population measurement, data quality, and record linkage.

Mark Phillips works in comparative privacy and data protection law, particularly where it intersects with health data sharing. His academic background is in law and computer science, and he is a practicing member of the Quebec Bar Association. He works at the Centre of Genomics and Policy at McGill University as an Academic Associate, and is the co-chair of the Data Protection Task Team of the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health’s Research and Ethics Work Stream. His comparative legal research focuses on topics including cloud computing, the identifiability of personal data, bioinformatics, and open data.

Victoria Stodden joined the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign an associate professor in Fall 2014, with affiliated faculty appointments in the School of Law, the departments of Computer Science and Statistics, and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. She is a leading figure in the area of reproducibility in computational science, exploring how can we better ensure the reliability and usefulness of scientific results in the face of increasingly sophisticated computational approaches to research. Her work addresses a wide range of topics, including standards of openness for data and code sharing, legal and policy barriers to disseminating reproducible research, robustness in replicated findings, cyberinfrastructure to enable reproducibility, and scientific publishing practices. Stodden co-chaired the NSF Advisory Committee for CyberInfrastructure and was a member of the NSF Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Advisory Committee. She also served on the National Academies Committees on "Reproducibility and Replication in Science" and "Responsible Science: Ensuring the Integrity of the Research Process." She has co-edited two books, published in 2014, Privacy, Big Data, and the Public Good: Frameworks for Engagement published by Cambridge University Press and Implementing Reproducible Research published by Taylor & Francis. Stodden earned both her PhD in statistics and her law degree from Stanford University. She is currently PI on two NSF Grants: EAGER: Reproducibility and Cyberinfrastructure for Computational and Data-Enabled Science and EAGER: Preserve/Destroy Decisions for Simulation Data in Computational Physics and Beyond

Salil Vadhan is the Vicky Joseph Professor of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics and Area Co-Chair for Computer Science in the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering & Applied Sciences. He is Lead PI on the Harvard Privacy Tools Project. Vadhan’s research in theoretical computer science spans differential privacy, computational complexity, and cryptography. His honors include a Harvard College Professorship, a Simons Investigator Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Christo Wilson is an Associate Professor in the College of Computer and Information Science at Northeastern University. Professor Wilson received his PhD from the University of California, Santa Barbara, working under Professor Ben Y. Zhao. He was the recipient of the Outstanding Dissertation Award from UCSB in 2012 and received a Best Paper Award at SIGCOMM in 2011. He received an NSF CAREER Award in 2016, and his work is funded by Verisign, the Data Transparency Lab, the Knight Foundation, and the European Commission. Professor Wilson performed the first large-scale measurements of Facebook in 2008 to understand how users form friendships and interact. These insights about the behavior of normal people enabled Professor Wilson to develop novel techniques for combating spam and fake accounts on social networks, even when the attacks are perpetrated by real people instead of automated software bots. These techniques have been successfully deployed on LinkedIn and Renren. Professor Wilson has shared anonymized social network datasets with over 500 research groups around the world and continues to open-source the code and data from his work examining algorithms and personalization on the Web.