PPIR 2014 - Workshop on Privacy-Preserving IR: When Information Retrieval Meets Privacy and Security

Information retrieval and information privacy/security are two fast-growing computer science disciplines. There are many synergies and connections between these two disciplines. However, there have been very limited efforts to connect the two. On the other hand, due to lack of mature techniques in privacy-preserving IR, concerns about privacy and security have become serious obstacles that prevent valuable user data to be used in IR research such as studies about query logs, social media, tweets, sessions, and medical record retrieval. This privacy-preserving IR workshop aims to spurring research brings together the research fields of IR and privacy/security, and mitigate privacy threats in information retrieval by exploring novel algorithms and tools.
Luo Si is an Associate Professor at Purdue University. His research interests include information retrieval, machine learning techniques and applications and information privacy/security with more than 100 publications. In particular, he has recently worked on applications of detection and anonymization of sensitive text information, privacy-preserving information search and malicious software detection with information retrieval and machine learning techniques. Si is an associate editor of ACM Transactions on Information System (TOIS), ACM Transactions on Interactive Information Systems (TIIS) and an editorial board member of Information Processing and Management (IPM). He has been an Area Chair for ACM SIGIR, WWW, WSDM and CIKM. Si was a workshop co-chair for SIGIR 2011.
Grace Hui Yang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Georgetown University. Grace's current research interests include privacy-preserving information retrieval, particularly online information exposure detection that predicts the vulnerability for common Web activities and warns users about the sensitivity of their activities before they make innocent moves. Her research interests also include session search, evaluation, information organization and ontology construction. Prior to this, Grace has worked on question answering, near-duplicate detection, multimedia information retrieval, and opinion and sentiment detection. The results of her research have been published in SIGIR, CIKM, ACL, TREC, ECIR, and WWW since 2002. Grace co-chaired the SIGIR 2013 and SIGIR 2014 Doctoral Consortium and serves as a program committee member in SIGIR, ACL, EMNLP, CIKM, WSDM, and KDD