Census data release, privacy, and optimization

Check our paper Differential Privacy of Hierarchical Census Data: An Optimization Approach, by Ferdinando Fioretto, Pascal Van Hentenryck, and Keyu Zhu, to be publsihed in Artificial Intelligence. It presents a state-of-the-art algorithm for releasing census data under the framework of differential privacy. Beautiful dynamic program exploiting the structure of the cost function.

Student Recognition of Excellence in Teaching: Class of 1934 Award

I am delighted to receive the Student Recognition of Excellence in Teaching: Class of 1934 Award at Georgia Tech. Back in 2010 when I was at Brown in Computer Science, I received the Philip J. Bray Award for Teaching Excellence. Those awards are incredibly special to me and always remind me how much I personally benefited from some amazing math and CS teachers in high school and college (Gaby and Baudouin, that is for you).

Large Scale Ride Sharing Systems

Check our video on integrating optimization, machine learning, and model-predictive control for large-scale ride-sharing systems.

It presents the paper Real-Time Dispatching of Large-Scale Ride-Sharing Systems: Integrating Optimization, Machine Learning, and Model Predictive Control. Connor Riley, Pascal Van Hentenryck, and Enpeng Yuan. In the Proceedings of 29th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-20), Tokyo, Japan 2020.

Bias in Differential Privacy

Check our AAAI 2021 paper on Bias and Variance of Post-processing in Differential Privacy.  It studies the effects of post-processing differentially private outputs (e.g., to restore feasibility of some constraints) on the noise distribution. The paper takes a first step towards understanding the properties of post-processing and quantifies the bias and variance introduced by a wide class of post-processing algorithms based on projection. It includes an analysis of the release of important quantities based on census data. The most interesting result is Theorem 5.