UCL at Microsoft's Research Faculty Summit

Microsoft is hosting its seventeenth annual Microsoft Research Faculty Summit in Redmond, Washington. This year the summit focuses on where and how computing can contribute to increasing productivity in professional and personal activities.

Dr Emiliano de Cristofaro, Senior Lecturer at UCL Computer Science and member of UCL's Information Security Research Group, has been invited to deliver a talk How to keep your Genome Secret, with XiaoQian Jiang, University of California-San Diego; and Kim Laine, Microsoft Research.

Over the last 10 years, the cost of sequencing the human genome has come down to around $1,000 per person. Human genomic data is a gold-mine of information, potentially unlocking the secrets to human health and longevity. As a society, we face ethical and privacy questions related to how to handle human genomic data. Should it be aggregated and made available for medical research? What are the risks to individual’s privacy? This panel will highlight some new cryptographic solutions for securely handling computation on genomic data, including homomorphic encryption and multi-party computation. We have developed demos of SEAL, the MSR Homomorphic Encryption library, which focus on private genomic predictions and health risk related predictions.

Throughout the summit more than 500 attendees from academia and Microsoft will have the opportunity to participate in sessions ranging from virtual reality, optical networks, streaming analytics and big data infrastructure to the future of work and crowdsourced problem solving. Participants will have the opportunity to stay an extra day to engage in workshops on topics that include quantum algorithms, the edge of AI, and safe autonomous cybersecurity.

See more at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/event/faculty-summit-2016/