32,846 research outputs found
Differential Privacy in Cooperative Multiagent Planning
Privacy-aware multiagent systems must protect agents' sensitive data while
simultaneously ensuring that agents accomplish their shared objectives. Towards
this goal, we propose a framework to privatize inter-agent communications in
cooperative multiagent decision-making problems. We study sequential
decision-making problems formulated as cooperative Markov games with
reach-avoid objectives. We apply a differential privacy mechanism to privatize
agents' communicated symbolic state trajectories, and then we analyze tradeoffs
between the strength of privacy and the team's performance. For a given level
of privacy, this tradeoff is shown to depend critically upon the total
correlation among agents' state-action processes. We synthesize policies that
are robust to privacy by reducing the value of the total correlation. Numerical
experiments demonstrate that the team's performance under these policies
decreases by only 3 percent when comparing private versus non-private
implementations of communication. By contrast, the team's performance decreases
by roughly 86 percent when using baseline policies that ignore total
correlation and only optimize team performance
Applying Bourdieu to socio-technical systems: The importance of affordances for social translucence in building 'capital' and status to eBay's success
This paper introduces the work of Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and his concepts of ‘the field’ and ‘capital’ in relation to eBay. This paper considers eBay to be a socio-technical system with its own set of social norms, rules and competition over ‘capital’. eBay is used as a case study of the importance of using a Bourdieuean approach to create successful socio-technical systems.Using a two-year qualitative study of eBay users as empirical illustration, this paper argues that a large part of eBay’s success is in the social and cultural affordances for social translucence and navigation of eBay’s website - in supporting the Bourdieuean competition over capital and status. This exploration has implications for wider socio-technical systems design which this paper will discuss - in particular, the importance of creating socially
translucent and navigable systems, informed by Bourdieu’s theoretical insights, which support competition for ‘capital’ and status
Proving Differential Privacy with Shadow Execution
Recent work on formal verification of differential privacy shows a trend
toward usability and expressiveness -- generating a correctness proof of
sophisticated algorithm while minimizing the annotation burden on programmers.
Sometimes, combining those two requires substantial changes to program logics:
one recent paper is able to verify Report Noisy Max automatically, but it
involves a complex verification system using customized program logics and
verifiers.
In this paper, we propose a new proof technique, called shadow execution, and
embed it into a language called ShadowDP. ShadowDP uses shadow execution to
generate proofs of differential privacy with very few programmer annotations
and without relying on customized logics and verifiers. In addition to
verifying Report Noisy Max, we show that it can verify a new variant of Sparse
Vector that reports the gap between some noisy query answers and the noisy
threshold. Moreover, ShadowDP reduces the complexity of verification: for all
of the algorithms we have evaluated, type checking and verification in total
takes at most 3 seconds, while prior work takes minutes on the same algorithms.Comment: 23 pages, 12 figures, PLDI'1
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