Matching Items (4)
Filtering by

Clear all filters

156751-Thumbnail Image.png
Description
In the past few decades, there has been a remarkable shift in the boundary between public and private information. The application of information technology and electronic communications allow service providers (businesses) to collect a large amount of data. However, this ``data collection" process can put the privacy of users at

In the past few decades, there has been a remarkable shift in the boundary between public and private information. The application of information technology and electronic communications allow service providers (businesses) to collect a large amount of data. However, this ``data collection" process can put the privacy of users at risk and also lead to user reluctance in accepting services or sharing data. This dissertation first investigates privacy sensitive consumer-retailers/service providers interactions under different scenarios, and then focuses on a unified framework for various information-theoretic privacy and privacy mechanisms that can be learned directly from data.

Existing approaches such as differential privacy or information-theoretic privacy try to quantify privacy risk but do not capture the subjective experience and heterogeneous expression of privacy-sensitivity. The first part of this dissertation introduces models to study consumer-retailer interaction problems and to better understand how retailers/service providers can balance their revenue objectives while being sensitive to user privacy concerns. This dissertation considers the following three scenarios: (i) the consumer-retailer interaction via personalized advertisements; (ii) incentive mechanisms that electrical utility providers need to offer for privacy sensitive consumers with alternative energy sources; (iii) the market viability of offering privacy guaranteed free online services. We use game-theoretic models to capture the behaviors of both consumers and retailers, and provide insights for retailers to maximize their profits when interacting with privacy sensitive consumers.

Preserving the utility of published datasets while simultaneously providing provable privacy guarantees is a well-known challenge. In the second part, a novel context-aware privacy framework called generative adversarial privacy (GAP) is introduced. Inspired by recent advancements in generative adversarial networks, GAP allows the data holder to learn the privatization mechanism directly from the data. Under GAP, finding the optimal privacy mechanism is formulated as a constrained minimax game between a privatizer and an adversary. For appropriately chosen adversarial loss functions, GAP provides privacy guarantees against strong information-theoretic adversaries. Both synthetic and real-world datasets are used to show that GAP can greatly reduce the adversary's capability of inferring private information at a small cost of distorting the data.
ContributorsHuang, Chong (Author) / Sankar, Lalitha (Thesis advisor) / Kosut, Oliver (Committee member) / Nedich, Angelia (Committee member) / Ying, Lei (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
137100-Thumbnail Image.png
Description
Multiple-channel detection is considered in the context of a sensor network where data can be exchanged directly between sensor nodes that share a common edge in the network graph. Optimal statistical tests used for signal source detection with multiple noisy sensors, such as the Generalized Coherence (GC) estimate, use pairwise

Multiple-channel detection is considered in the context of a sensor network where data can be exchanged directly between sensor nodes that share a common edge in the network graph. Optimal statistical tests used for signal source detection with multiple noisy sensors, such as the Generalized Coherence (GC) estimate, use pairwise measurements from every pair of sensors in the network and are thus only applicable when the network graph is completely connected, or when data are accumulated at a common fusion center. This thesis presents and exploits a new method that uses maximum-entropy techniques to estimate measurements between pairs of sensors that are not in direct communication, thereby enabling the use of the GC estimate in incompletely connected sensor networks. The research in this thesis culminates in a main conjecture supported by statistical tests regarding the topology of the incomplete network graphs.
ContributorsCrider, Lauren Nicole (Author) / Cochran, Douglas (Thesis director) / Renaut, Rosemary (Committee member) / Kosut, Oliver (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (Contributor)
Created2014-05
147972-Thumbnail Image.png
Description

Lossy compression is a form of compression that slightly degrades a signal in ways that are ideally not detectable to the human ear. This is opposite to lossless compression, in which the sample is not degraded at all. While lossless compression may seem like the best option, lossy compression, which

Lossy compression is a form of compression that slightly degrades a signal in ways that are ideally not detectable to the human ear. This is opposite to lossless compression, in which the sample is not degraded at all. While lossless compression may seem like the best option, lossy compression, which is used in most audio and video, reduces transmission time and results in much smaller file sizes. However, this compression can affect quality if it goes too far. The more compression there is on a waveform, the more degradation there is, and once a file is lossy compressed, this process is not reversible. This project will observe the degradation of an audio signal after the application of Singular Value Decomposition compression, a lossy compression that eliminates singular values from a signal’s matrix.

ContributorsHirte, Amanda (Author) / Kosut, Oliver (Thesis director) / Bliss, Daniel (Committee member) / Electrical Engineering Program (Contributor, Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2021-05
187813-Thumbnail Image.png
Description
The presence of strategic agents can pose unique challenges to data collection and distributed learning. This dissertation first explores the social network dimension of data collection markets, and then focuses on how the strategic agents can be efficiently and effectively incentivized to cooperate in distributed machine learning frameworks. The first problem

The presence of strategic agents can pose unique challenges to data collection and distributed learning. This dissertation first explores the social network dimension of data collection markets, and then focuses on how the strategic agents can be efficiently and effectively incentivized to cooperate in distributed machine learning frameworks. The first problem explores the impact of social learning in collecting and trading unverifiable information where a data collector purchases data from users through a payment mechanism. Each user starts with a personal signal which represents the knowledge about the underlying state the data collector desires to learn. Through social interactions, each user also acquires additional information from his neighbors in the social network. It is revealed that both the data collector and the users can benefit from social learning which drives down the privacy costs and helps to improve the state estimation for a given total payment budget. In the second half, a federated learning scheme to train a global learning model with strategic agents, who are not bound to contribute their resources unconditionally, is considered. Since the agents are not obliged to provide their true stochastic gradient updates and the server is not capable of directly validating the authenticity of reported updates, the learning process may reach a noncooperative equilibrium. First, the actions of the agents are assumed to be binary: cooperative or defective. If the cooperative action is taken, the agent sends a privacy-preserved version of stochastic gradient signal. If the defective action is taken, the agent sends an arbitrary uninformative noise signal. Furthermore, this setup is extended into the scenarios with more general actions spaces where the quality of the stochastic gradient updates have a range of discrete levels. The proposed methodology evaluates each agent's stochastic gradient according to a reference gradient estimate which is constructed from the gradients provided by other agents, and rewards the agent based on that evaluation.
ContributorsAkbay, Abdullah Basar (Author) / Tepedelenlioğlu, Cihan (Thesis advisor) / Spanias, Andreas (Committee member) / Kosut, Oliver (Committee member) / Ewaisha, Ahmed (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023