Sebastian Angel
October 22, 2021 at 12:00 PM on Zoom / Soda Hall
New Advances in Private Information Retrieval
Abstract: In this talk I will cover the basics of private information retrieval (PIR), which is a cryptography primitive that allows a client to retrieve an element from a database without revealing to the database operator which element is being fetched. I will then discuss several applications of PIR to systems, and cover some of our new developments of PIR. These include a new way of achieving sublinear computation in PIR with the use of preprocessing, even when a database is constantly being updated; and a new variant of PIR that includes a notion of access control.
Bio: Sebastian Angel is the Raj and Neera Singh Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research. He is the recipient of an NSF Career Award, a JP Morgan Chase Faculty Award, and the ACM SIGOPS Doctoral Dissertation Award. Sebastian works on systems, security, and privacy. His recent current work includes making expensive cryptography easier to use and more efficient, designing large scale systems for privately processing federated graph data, and building communication systems that hide metadata.