8,859 research outputs found
Ensuring sample quality for biomarker discovery studies - Use of ict tools to trace biosample life-cycle
The growing demand of personalized medicine marked the transition from an empirical medicine to a molecular one, aimed at predicting safer and more effective medical treatment for every patient, while minimizing adverse effects. This passage has emphasized the importance of biomarker discovery studies, and has led sample availability to assume a crucial role in biomedical research. Accordingly, a great interest in Biological Bank science has grown concomitantly. In biobanks, biological material and its accompanying data are collected, handled and stored in accordance with standard operating procedures (SOPs) and existing legislation. Sample quality is ensured by adherence to SOPs and sample whole life-cycle can be recorded by innovative tracking systems employing information technology (IT) tools for monitoring storage conditions and characterization of vast amount of data. All the above will ensure proper sample exchangeability among research facilities and will represent the starting point of all future personalized medicine-based clinical trials
CHORUS Deliverable 2.2: Second report - identification of multi-disciplinary key issues for gap analysis toward EU multimedia search engines roadmap
After addressing the state-of-the-art during the first year of Chorus and establishing the existing landscape in
multimedia search engines, we have identified and analyzed gaps within European research effort during our second year.
In this period we focused on three directions, notably technological issues, user-centred issues and use-cases and socio-
economic and legal aspects. These were assessed by two central studies: firstly, a concerted vision of functional breakdown
of generic multimedia search engine, and secondly, a representative use-cases descriptions with the related discussion on
requirement for technological challenges. Both studies have been carried out in cooperation and consultation with the
community at large through EC concertation meetings (multimedia search engines cluster), several meetings with our
Think-Tank, presentations in international conferences, and surveys addressed to EU projects coordinators as well as
National initiatives coordinators. Based on the obtained feedback we identified two types of gaps, namely core
technological gaps that involve research challenges, and “enablers”, which are not necessarily technical research
challenges, but have impact on innovation progress. New socio-economic trends are presented as well as emerging legal
challenges
Profiling user activities with minimal traffic traces
Understanding user behavior is essential to personalize and enrich a user's
online experience. While there are significant benefits to be accrued from the
pursuit of personalized services based on a fine-grained behavioral analysis,
care must be taken to address user privacy concerns. In this paper, we consider
the use of web traces with truncated URLs - each URL is trimmed to only contain
the web domain - for this purpose. While such truncation removes the
fine-grained sensitive information, it also strips the data of many features
that are crucial to the profiling of user activity. We show how to overcome the
severe handicap of lack of crucial features for the purpose of filtering out
the URLs representing a user activity from the noisy network traffic trace
(including advertisement, spam, analytics, webscripts) with high accuracy. This
activity profiling with truncated URLs enables the network operators to provide
personalized services while mitigating privacy concerns by storing and sharing
only truncated traffic traces.
In order to offset the accuracy loss due to truncation, our statistical
methodology leverages specialized features extracted from a group of
consecutive URLs that represent a micro user action like web click, chat reply,
etc., which we call bursts. These bursts, in turn, are detected by a novel
algorithm which is based on our observed characteristics of the inter-arrival
time of HTTP records. We present an extensive experimental evaluation on a real
dataset of mobile web traces, consisting of more than 130 million records,
representing the browsing activities of 10,000 users over a period of 30 days.
Our results show that the proposed methodology achieves around 90% accuracy in
segregating URLs representing user activities from non-representative URLs
Privacy Preservation by Disassociation
In this work, we focus on protection against identity disclosure in the
publication of sparse multidimensional data. Existing multidimensional
anonymization techniquesa) protect the privacy of users either by altering the
set of quasi-identifiers of the original data (e.g., by generalization or
suppression) or by adding noise (e.g., using differential privacy) and/or (b)
assume a clear distinction between sensitive and non-sensitive information and
sever the possible linkage. In many real world applications the above
techniques are not applicable. For instance, consider web search query logs.
Suppressing or generalizing anonymization methods would remove the most
valuable information in the dataset: the original query terms. Additionally,
web search query logs contain millions of query terms which cannot be
categorized as sensitive or non-sensitive since a term may be sensitive for a
user and non-sensitive for another. Motivated by this observation, we propose
an anonymization technique termed disassociation that preserves the original
terms but hides the fact that two or more different terms appear in the same
record. We protect the users' privacy by disassociating record terms that
participate in identifying combinations. This way the adversary cannot
associate with high probability a record with a rare combination of terms. To
the best of our knowledge, our proposal is the first to employ such a technique
to provide protection against identity disclosure. We propose an anonymization
algorithm based on our approach and evaluate its performance on real and
synthetic datasets, comparing it against other state-of-the-art methods based
on generalization and differential privacy.Comment: VLDB201
From user-generated data to data-driven innovation: A research agenda to understand user privacy in digital markets
[EN] In recent years, strategies focused on data-driven innovation (DDI) have led to the emergence and development of new products and business models in the digital market. However, these advances have given rise to the development of sophisticated strategies for data management, predicting user behavior, or analyzing their actions. Accordingly, the large-scale analysis of user-generated data (UGD) has led to the emergence of user privacy concerns about how companies manage user data. Although there are some studies on data security, privacy protection, and data-driven strategies, a systematic review on the subject that would focus on both UGD and DDI as main concepts is lacking. Therefore, the present study aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the main challenges related to user privacy that affect DDI. The methodology used in the present study unfolds in the following three phases; (i) a systematic literature review (SLR); (ii) in-depth interviews framed in the perspectives of UGD and DDI on user privacy concerns, and finally, (iii) topic-modeling using a Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) model to extract insights related to the object of study. Based on the results, we identify 14 topics related to the study of DDI and UGD strategies. In addition, 14 future research questions and 7 research propositions are presented that should be consider for the study of UGD, DDI and user privacy in digital markets. The paper concludes with an important discussion regarding the role of user privacy in DDI in digital markets.Saura, JR.; Ribeiro-Soriano, D.; Palacios Marqués, D. (2021). From user-generated data to data-driven innovation: A research agenda to
understand user privacy in digital markets. International Journal of Information Management. 60:1-13. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2021.102331S1136
Obfuscation and anonymization methods for locational privacy protection : a systematic literature review
Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Geospatial TechnologiesThe mobile technology development combined with the business model of a majority
of application companies is posing a potential risk to individuals’ privacy.
Because the industry default practice is unrestricted data collection. Although,
the data collection has virtuous usage in improve services and procedures; it also
undermines user’s privacy. For that reason is crucial to learn what is the privacy
protection mechanism state-of-art.
Privacy protection can be pursued by passing new regulation and developing
preserving mechanism. Understanding in what extent the current technology is
capable to protect devices or systems is important to drive the advancements
in the privacy preserving field, addressing the limits and challenges to deploy
mechanism with a reasonable quality of Service-QoS level.
This research aims to display and discuss the current privacy preserving
schemes, its capabilities, limitations and challenges
Resolving the personalization-privacy dilemma: theory and implications of a privacy-preserving contract
Working papers seriesPersonalization is an integral part of e-commerce strategy today. A unique feature of personalization is that it requires users to provide a certain amount of personal information to the service provider, thus giving rise to an interesting dilemma in that consumers cannot enjoy more personalized services without sacrificing more privacy. In this paper, we propose a mechanism that allows an online personalization vendor to provide proper incentives for consumers to share information, while protecting their privacy at the same time. The proposed solution not only enables consumers and the firm to engage in an otherwise unviable market, but it also allows the firm to implement an incentive-compatible menu that serves all consumers regardless of their privacy sensitivity. Further, we demonstrate that a minimum privacy-preservation policy is an effective device for protecting consumers’ online privacy, and that it outperforms restricting vendors’ ability in collecting customer information.
Our proposed mechanism is of theoretical and practical importance: By transforming the compensation schedule (privacy preservation) into a set-compliment device to the production variable, our approach offers an alternative to the reliance on external transfer, thus eradicating a major constraint confronted by traditional mechanism design. Practically, our research proposes a realistic, easily-implementable solution to the fervent calls for endowing consumers with greater control over their online privacy. Further, it offers important policy guidelines to the regulator on not only what devices can be applied in governing the information practice of online vendors, but also exactly how social-efficiency can be enhanced.preprin
- …