Student research opportunities

Privacy-preserving record linkage on multiple large databases

Project Code: CECS_881

This project is available at the following levels:
Honours, Masters, PhD

Keywords:

Record linkage, entity resolution, data matching, privacy

Supervisor:

Assoc Professor Peter Christen

Outline:

Protecting the privacy of personal data is an increasingly difficult task, as organisations are under pressure
to better utilise their large databases through sharing and analysis. It is now recognised that linking data
between organisations can be of great benefit. It can help discover novel and valuable information that is not
available in individual databases. Preserving privacy when linking databases that contain personal data is of
vital importance. This project will develop new techniques that will allow automated and accurate linking of
multiple large databases while preserving the privacy of the data to be linked.

Goals of this project

The outcomes of this project provide advances to linking data in areas like health, commerce, research, and national security. The specific goal for this student research project are to develop scalable techniques for linking data from multiple sources without any private information being revealed.

Requirements/Prerequisites

Ideally, a student working on this project has a strong background in computer science, specifically advanced algorithms and data structures, data mining, and applied cryptography, as well as mathematics and statistics. Good programming skills in Python, Java or R are also required.

Student Gain

We have a PhD scholarship for this project, available both to suitable domestic or international applicants. For details of requirements please see: http://cecs.anu.edu.au/phd/.

The student will be involved in an international project funded by the Australian Research Council, conducted in collaboration with Assoc Prof Vassilios Verykios (Hellenic Open University, Greece). The student will learn about data matching and privacy technologies, two fields of research that have gained intense interest in recent years in many areas in the public and private sectors