Topic: Privacy in Data Mining

The recent proliferation of data mining tools for the analysis of large volumes of data has paid little attention to individual privacy issues. Dr Brankovic will be in Canberra to talk at the ANU about work with Dr Vladimir Estivill-Castro aimed at finding a balance between the individuals' right to privacy and the data-miners' need to find general patterns in huge volumes of detailed records:

We argue that in data mining the major requirement of security control mechanism (in addition to protecting privacy) is not to ensure precise and bias-free statistics, but rather to preserve the high-level descriptions of knowledge constructed by artificial data mining tools.

How do we balance individual privacy and the social and commercial needs to find patterns in records? Join Dr Brankovic and the Internet community of Canberra to discuss the issues over a drink.

IRCs are free (but you have to buy your own drinks and one for the special guest) and open to anyone interested: just turn up. Internet Reality Check (not to be confused with Internet Relay Chat) is designed so that members of the 'net community can meet and exchange the small amount of very important information which is not suitable for digital transmission. ;-)

• Department of Computer Science Seminar, The Australian National University, 4 February 2000, 2:00 pm
• About the Speaker
• Internet Reality Check