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Salil Vadhan is the Vicky Joseph Professor of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering & Applied Sciences. 

Vadhan’s research in theoretical computer science spans computational complexity, cryptography, and data privacy. His honors include election to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, a Harvard College Professorship, and a Simons Investigator Award,. Together with Gary King, Vadhan leads the OpenDP project, a community effort to build an open-source suite of tools for deploying differential privacy, a methodology for ensuring that AI models and statistical releases based on sensitive datasets do not reveal individual-level information. OpenDP is an outgrowth of the Privacy Tools Project, which was a collaboration with the Berkman-Klein Center to advance a multidisciplinary understanding of data privacy issues and build computational, statistical, legal, and policy tools to help address these issues in a variety of contexts.

Publications

Publication
Nov 1, 2018

Differential Privacy

A Primer for a Non-Technical Audience

This primer aims to provide a foundation that can guide future decisions when analyzing and sharing statistical data about individuals, informing individuals about the privacy…

Publication
Aug 21, 2018

Bridging the Gap between Computer Science and Legal Approaches to Privacy

A look at the gaps that exist between how privacy risks are conceptualized between the fields of law and computer science

Publication
May 31, 2016

Towards a Modern Approach to Privacy-Aware Government Data Releases

Governments are under increasing pressure to promote transparency, accountability, and innovation by making the data they hold available to the public. Because the data often…

Publication
Mar 27, 2015

Integrating Approaches to Privacy Across the Research Lifecycle: When Is Information Purely Public?

This workshop report, the second in a series, identifies selected questions and explores issues around the meaning of “public” in the context of using data about individuals for…

Publication
Aug 3, 2014

Integrating Approaches to Privacy across the Research Lifecycle: Long-term Longitudinal Studies

This paper explores interdisciplinary approaches to privacy in long-term longitudinal studies of human subjects. Long-term longitudinal studies collect, at multiple points over a…