Latanya Arvette Sweeney

CURRICULUM VITAE

Address:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Laboratory for Computer Science
545 Technology Square, NE43-418
Cambridge, MA 02139, USA

Telephone: (617) 253-3539
Fax: (617) 258-8682
Email: sweeney@mit.edu
WWW: https://www.carrie.lcs.mit.edu/people/sweeney

Principal Fields of Interest:

Fields: data confidentiality, data mining, data warehousing, artificial intelligence, knowledge representation and learning. My primary endeavor is to develop computer systems that model human learning and reasoning. Applying this pursuit to the task of maintaining privacy and confidentiality in a globally networked society has allowed me to explore a new area of computer science, which I term computational disclosure control. This is the study of computational techniques for discovering and controlling inferences that can be drawn from disclosed data such that the identity of individuals and other entities contained in the released data cannot be recognized even though the data remain practically useful. I also work on modeling human learning and behavior in other areas including auditory perception, spelling, collaboration and teaching.

Education:

• Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA., Candidate for Ph.D. in Computer Science. Computational Disclosure Control: Theory and Practice.

• Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA., S.M. 1997 in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Sprees, a Finite-State Orthographic Learning System that Recognizes and Generates Phonologically Similar Spellings. GPA 4.9/5.0

• Harvard University, Cambridge, MA., ALB 1995 in Computer Science, Summa Cum Laude. A Coin Toss: the Dialectical Odds aren't always 50/50. Honors grades in all courses. Completed graduate courses in computer science, mathematics, physics, educational psychology and philosophy.

• Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA. 1979 Undergraduate studies in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

• Dana Hall Schools, Wellesley, MA. High school diploma 1977. Among other honors, delivered Valedictorian speech.

Research:

• 1995-present National Library of Medicine Informatics Fellow. See separate publications for the following works. All work conducted under Medical Informatics Training Grant (1 T15 LM07092).
  • Datafly -- a formal presentation of problems with and practical solutions for releasing individual-specific information so that the resulting data are as detailed as possible without violating privacy. Keywords: confidentiality, record linkage, data security.

  • BeBe, Phoneme Detector -- a new approach to speech recognition modeled after the human brain's tendency to automatically categorize speech sounds. Keywords: speech understanding, AI architectures, real time systems.

  • Sprees -- finite-state learning of spelling rules. Related current work uses genetic programming in an interactive session to recommend new product, company and baby names after training on a list of words that suggest the desired connotations. Keywords: computational phonology, machine learning.

• Scrub -- detects personally-identifying information in unrestricted text. Adaptive version includes genetic programming to build recognition templates. Keywords: patient confidentiality, AI architectures, NLP.

• Collaboration Wheel -- modified web browser that supports text and graphics annotation and provides revision control for joint work.

• Dialectical Logic -- formal mathematical presentation of dialectical logic and applications that demonstrate its usefulness as a knowledge representation and reasoning mechanism.

• Power Learning C++ -- a computerized, tightly structured learning environment to teach and learn the C++ programming language.

• 1993-1994 Co-Principal Investigator, NECUSE grant. Designed and implemented computer hardware for the teaching-learning of digital design and computer architecture. Allows instructors to build live and active electronic circuits by placing magnetic boxes on a traditional chalkboard. Devices begin with transistors, then advance to gates, RAMs, and all the way to a CPU. Different instructors have used the devices flawlessly in Harvard computer science courses.

Public Service:

• Health Privacy Project, Working Group, at Georgetown University.

• Massachusetts State Committee on Healthcare, Medical Record Confidentiality Working Group.

• National Committee for Quality Assurance, Joint Sessions on Security and Confidentiality of Medical Information.

• World Wide Web Consortium, Personal Privacy Preferences Working Group.

• Harvard University DCE, Technical advisor on the use of technology in distance learning and adult education.

• Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, mentoring graduate and undergraduate students.

Awards and Honors Received:

• American Medical Informatics Association, Finalist, 1997.
• National Library of Medicine, Research Recognition, 1997.
• American Medical Informatics Association, First Place, 1996.
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Masterworks Finalist, 1996.
• National Library of Medicine, Fellow, 1995.
• Harvard University, Academic Achievement Award, 1995.

Memberships:

• American Association for Artificial Intelligence
• American Medical Informatics Association
• Association for Computing Machinery
• Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers
• International Federation for Information Processing
• Sigma Xi

Teaching Experience:

• 1995-1996 Harvard University, Summer School, Instructor, Data Structures and Algorithms in C++, an intensive 8-unit double course. Taught daily lectures, composed and published handouts, assignments and tests for both graduate and undergraduate students, coordinated section materials with teaching staff. Received 7, on a maximum scale of 7, in student evaluations.

• 1994 Harvard University, Summer School, Head Teaching Fellow, Data Structures and Algorithms in C++, an intensive 8-unit double course. Taught daily section meetings, composed and published daily section handouts, tutored graduate and undergraduate students, coordinated section materials with teaching staff, and supervised graduate projects . Received 7, on a maximum scale of 7, in student evaluations.

• 1994 Harvard College, Teaching Fellow, Great Ideas in Computer Science, an overview of computer science. Taught weekly section meetings, composed and published section handouts, tutored students, and graded homework. Received 5, on a maximum scale of 5, in student evaluations.

• 1993 Harvard University, Extension School, Teaching Fellow, computer science and programming in C. Taught weekly section meetings, composed and published section handouts, tutored students, supervised graduate projects, and graded homework. Received 7, on a maximum scale of 7, in student evaluations.

• 1993 Harvard University, Extension School, Teaching Fellow, Computer Architecture, a graduate course. Taught weekly section meetings, composed and published section handouts, tutored students, supervised joint graduate projects, and graded homework. Received 7, on a maximum scale of 7, in student evaluations.

• 1993 Harvard University, Summer School, Head Teaching Fellow, Data Structures and Algorithms in Pascal, an intensive 8-unit double course. Taught daily section meetings, composed and published daily section handouts, and tutored graduate and undergraduate students. Received 7, on a maximum scale of 7, in student evaluations.

• 1992 Harvard University, Extension School, Teaching Fellow, computer science and programming in C. Taught weekly section meetings, composed and published section handouts, tutored students, supervised a joint graduate project, and graded homework. Received 7, on a maximum scale of 7, in student evaluations.

Other Work Experience:

• 1981-1991 CESS Computers, Owner and President. Founded and managed a medium-sized computer company that provided retail and customized software services. Supervised staffs of programmers, repair technicians, and sales representatives.
  • Computer science duties included: designed, developed and tested custom software; and, maintained working knowledge of latest computer hardware, software and programming tools. Computer science projects personally completed include:

  • Created and implemented an expert system shell of my own design, in C. It utilized hypertext concepts within a structured environment. A consulting application was built in the shell for TRW that included access by modem communication.

  • Created and developed database software in lisp, for fund raising. The computer tracks donor giving history and maps the donor's performance into a psychological profile. Notices and solicitations are personally worded and then scheduled, based on the profile. At the time, used by more than 30 leading non-profit organizations including Democratic National Party, National Organization for Women, Harlem Boy's Choir, Bishop Tutu's South African Freedom Campaign, and Greenpeace.

  • Developed and built a heuristic pattern matching program in lisp that creates a bibliographical database from raw text files. Used by Chitin Research to maximize literature searches.

  • Studied dialectical logic under scholars from the United States, Central Intelligence Agency. Designed a computer model to represent this logic.

  • Designed and implemented, under Microsoft Windows, repair solicitation software that monitors the age of computer equipment and automatically produces servicing reminders; dBase and Paradox compatible.

• 1983 - 1985 Power Learning Company. Designed and implemented animated, computer-aided-instruction that teaches complete mathematics curriculums. Also, designed and implemented a graphics paint editor for programmers that convert on-screen pictures to corresponding C, BASIC or LISP code.

• 1980 - 1982 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Research Staff Assistant. Built and supported specialized computers (called LISP machines). Designed and implemented several software projects including a purchasing system, an interface for a touch-feel system, an interface driver for an IBM one-handed keyboard, and a voice synthesizer system.

Invited Talks:

• "Medical Data and Privacy Protections in Today's Technologically-Empowered Society", Maryland Medical Society, Baltimore, Maryland, 1998.

• "Public-use files: production, linking and anonymity", United States Health Care and Finance Administration, 1998.

• "Re-Identification of De-Identified Medical Data", National Center for Vital Health Statistics, Baltimore, Maryland, 1998.

• "Computational Solutions to Releasing Personal Information in the Age of Data Mining", Carnegie Mellon University, Center for Automated Learning and Discovery, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1997.

• "The Difficulties of Generating and Using Anonymous Data", University of Pittsburgh, Medical Informatics Program, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1997.

• "The Information Challenge to Privacy, Confidentiality and De-classification", Carnegie Mellon University, The Heinz School for Public Policy, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1997.

• "The Risks of De-Identified and Anonymous Data", SRI International, Database Security, Menlo Park, California, 1997.

• "Disclosing Anonymous Data in a Globally-Networked Society", Stanford University, Database Group, Palo Alto, California, 1997.

• "Yesterday Transistor Logic, Today Digital Computers and Tomorrow Atomic Automata", Harvard Summer School, Computer Science, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1997.

• "Problems and Solutions in Releasing De-identified Patient Records", National Library of Medicine, Annual Trainee Meeting, 1997.

• "How to Disclose Anonymous Medical Data", Massachusetts General Hospital, Laboratory of Computer Science, Boston, Massachusetts, 1997.

• "Who Gets Access to What Kind of Patient Data", Beth Israel Hospital, BIRT Lecture, Boston, Massachusetts, 1997.

• "Generating Anonymous Data on-the-Fly", Carnegie Mellon University, The Heinz School of Public Policy, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1997.

• "How to De-Identify Medical Text", Massachusetts General Hospital, Laboratory of Computer Science, Boston, Massachusetts, 1996.

• "Replacing Personally-Identifying Information in Medical Records, the Scrub System", Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Masterworks, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1996.

• "Team Wheel: a New Collaboration Tool", Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Clinical Decision-Making Group, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1995.

Publications

1. Power Learning: using computers as teaching machines. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Artificial Intelligence Laboratory: Working Paper. 1998.

2. Speech perception using real-time phoneme detection, the BeBe System (with Patrick Thompson). Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Laboratory for Computer Science: Tech Report MIT-LCS-TR-736. 1998.

3. Protection models for anonymous databases. Under review for publication.

4. Towards the collection of all the data on all the people. MIT Artificial Intelligence Working Paper, 1998.

5. Foundations of computational disclosure control. Under review for publication.

6. Commentary: Researchers need not rely on consent or not.New England Journal of Medicine, 1998 (forthcoming).

7. Protecting privacy when disclosing information: k-anonymity and its enforcement through generalization and suppression (with Pierangela Samarati). Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Research in Security and Privacy, May 1998, Oakland, CA.

8. Generalizing data to provide anonymity when disclosing information (with Pierangela Samarati). ACM Principles of Database Systems. Seattle, WA, USA, 1998. (forthcoming).

9. Towards the optimal suppression of details when disclosing medical data, the use of sub-combination analysis. Under review for publication.

10. Three computational systems for disclosing medical data in the year 1999. Proceedings, MEDINFO 98. International Medical Informatics Association. Seoul, Korea. North-Holland, 1998 (forthcoming).

11. Datafly: a system for providing anonymity in medical data. Database Security. IEEE, IFIP. 1997 (forthcoming).

12. Weaving technology and policy together to maintain confidentiality. Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics. 1997, 25:98-110.

13. Guaranteeing anonymity when sharing medical data, the datafly system. Proceedings, Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. Washington, DC: Hanley & Belfus, Inc., 1997.

14. Maintaining anonymity when sharing medical data, the datafly system. MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Working Paper. Cambridge: AIWP-WP344 (1997).

15. Computational Disclosure Control for Medical Microdata. Record Linkage Workshop. Bureau of the Census. Washington, DC: 1997.

16. Replacing Personally-Identifying Information in Medical Records, the Scrub System. In: Cimino, JJ, ed. Proceedings, Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. Washington, DC: Hanley & Belfus, Inc., 1996:333-337.

17. Speech Perception using Real-time Phoneme Detection, the BeBe System (with Patrick Thompson). Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Artificial Intelligence Laboratory: Working paper. 1996.

18. Speech Sprees, a Finite-State Orthographic Learning System that Recognizes and Generates Phonologically Similar Spellings. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Artificial Intelligence Laboratory: Working paper, Masters Thesis. 1996.

19. Multiple hashed binary storage of words -- tiny, fast and almost perfect. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, AI Laboratory: Working paper. 1996.

20. Computer Guide (with Sylvia Barrett). Cambridge: CESS Publishing. 1983.

References:

Available upon request.