Automatic department seminar "Differential confidentiality for dynamic data".

Emerging systems such as smart grids or intelligent transportation systems often require end-user applications to constantly send information to external data aggregators performing monitoring or control tasks. This can lead to an undesirable loss of user privacy in exchange for the benefits provided by the application.

Motivated by this trend, we introduce privacy issues in a systems-theoretic context and address the problem of broadcasting filtered signals that respect the confidentiality of user data streams.

Our approach is based on a formal notion of privacy from the database literature, called differential privacy, which provides strong privacy guarantees against adversaries with arbitrary secondary information.

This talk will discuss scenarios in which it is important to design filters, dynamic estimators and controllers with confidentiality constraints, and show how tools from systems and control theory can help in this task.

Jérôme Le Ny has been a professor of electrical engineering at Polytechnique Montréal since May 2012, where he heads the Mobile Robotics and Autonomous Systems Laboratory.

He is also a member of GERAD, a multi-university research center in decision sciences based in Montreal.

Previously, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the GRASP laboratory and the PRECISE Center for Embedded Systems at the University of Pennsylvania.

A 2001 graduate of École polytechnique (France), he earned a master's degree in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) in 2003 and a PhD in aeronautics and astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge) in 2008.

His research focuses on multi-agent systems and control, medium-field games, security and privacy in cyber-physical systems, with applications to networked embedded control systems, mobile robotic networks and transportation and energy systems.