Latanya Sweeney is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University and an Assistant Professor of Computer Science in the Center for Automated Learning and Discovery at Carnegie Mellon University. She is also a National Library of Medicine Fellow and a Ph.D. candidate in computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She received a S.M. degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an A.L.B. degree in computer science from Harvard University. Before that, Sweeney was the CEO and president of a medium-sized computer company for ten years and prior to that, her earlier undergraduate studies in computer science were done in 1977 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Sweeney's primary research endeavor concerns controlling and identifying inferences that can be drawn from data. She develops computer systems for producing anonymous data such that the identity of any individual contained in the released data cannot be recognized. This pursuit has led her to pioneer a new area of computer science termed computational disclosure control. (בקרת החשיפה הממוחשבת) Sweeney continues to develop commercial and academic products in this area and publishes and talks extensively throughout the world on the problems and solutions of producing non-identifiable data in the age of fast computers with large storage capacities and the Internet. Her work includes the Scrub System, which locates and replaces personally identifying information in unrestricted text. Her Scrub work has received numerous awards including First Prize from the American Medical Informatics Association. Sweeney also produced the Datafly System, which maintains anonymity in field-structured records by automatically generalizing, substituting and removing information as appropriate. This work has led Sweeney to work with numerous collaborators at other universities and within governmental agencies and has won her international recognition.
Despite the possible effectiveness of these systems, care must be taken when released data can identify individuals and coherent policies and procedures must enforce such care. Remedy against abuse lies outside these systems and resides in contracts, operating procedures and laws. For this reason, Sweeney also works on related policy issues and continues to testify before legislators and work on legislation. Among other current projects, Sweeney works with the World Wide Web Consortium on establishing privacy policies for the Internet.
Sweeney is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) and the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).
* Protection models for anonymous databases. Under review for publication.
* Towards the collection of all the data on all the people. MIT Artificial Intelligence Working Paper, 1998.
* Foundations of computational disclosure control. Under review for publication.
* Commentary: researchers need not rely on consent or not. New England Journal of Medicine, 1998. (forthcoming)
* Protecting privacy when disclosing information: k-anonymity and its enforcement through generalization and suppression (with Pierangela Samarati). Unpublished.
* Generalizing data to provide anonymity when disclosing information (with Pierangela Samarati). ACM Principles of Database Systems, Seatle, WA, USA, 1998. Unpublished.
* Towards the optimal suppression of details when disclosing medical data, the use of sub-combination analysis. Under review for publication.
* Three computational systems for disclosing medical data in the year 1999. Proceedings, MEDINFO 98. International Medical Informatics Association. Seoul, Korea. North-Holland, 1998 (forthcoming).
* Datafly: a system for providing
anonymity in medical data. Database Security XI: Status and Prospects,
T.Y. Lin and S. Qian, eds. IEEE, IFIP. New York: Chapman & Hall, 1998.
Postscript file,(238 KB)
* Weaving technology and policy together to maintain confidentiality. Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics. 1997, 25:98-110.
* Sweeney, L. Maintaining anonymity
when sharing medical data,
the datafly system. MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Working Paper.
Cambridge: AIWP-WP344 (1997).
Long, technical paper.
Postscript file (1.4 MB)
Postscript file, Compressed (380 KB)
* Sweeney, L. Computational
disclosure control for medical microdata. Record Linkage Workshop Bureau
of the Census. Washington: (1997).
Coming to the web soon.
* Sweeney, L. Guaranteeing
anonymity when sharing medical data,
the datafly system. Proceedings, Journal of the American Medical
Informatics Association. Washington, DC: Hanley & Belfus, Inc, 1997.
Short paper. Coming to the web soon.
* Sweeney, L. Replacing
personally-identifying information in medical records,
the scrub system. In: Cimino, JJ, ed. Proceedings, Journal of the
American Medical Informatics Association. Washington, DC: Hanley & Belfus,
Inc, 1996:333-337.
This paper was awarded First Prize at AMIA 1996.
Postscript file (300 KB)
Click here for Latanya Sweeney's Home Page
Last modified 6/17/98 by latanya@andrew.cmu.edu