Four short links: 3 June 2019
Differential Privacy, Future Op-Ed, Spectroscopy, and Research Programming Environment
- Differential Privacy in the Census (Science) — Differential privacy, first described in 2006, isn’t a substitute for swapping and other ways to perturb the data. Rather, it allows someone—in this case, the Census Bureau—to measure the likelihood that enough information will “leak” from a public data set to open the door to reconstruction. “Any time you release a statistic, you’re leaking something,” explains Jerry Reiter, a professor of statistics at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, who has worked on differential privacy as a consultant with the Census Bureau. “The only way to absolutely ensure confidentiality is to release no data. So the question is, how much risk is OK? Differential privacy allows you to put a boundary” on that risk.
- It’s 2059, and the Rich Kids Are Still Winning (NYT) — Ted Chiang’s “Op-Ed From the Future.” (via Slashdot)
- Classification of Household Materials via Spectroscopy — we collected a data set of spectral measurements from two commercially available spectrometers during which a robotic platform interacted with 50 distinct objects, and we show that a residual neural network can accurately analyze these measurements. Due to the low variance in consecutive spectral measurements, our model achieved a material classification accuracy of 97.7% when given only one spectral sample per object.
- Flowsheets — A research prototype programming environment for making programs while seeing the data the program outputs. See the demo video.
