Sharing knowledge without sharing data: on the false choice between the privacy and utility of information

Presentation slides for Azer Bestavros' June 1, 2017 talk at the BU Law School.As part of an ongoing collaboration, the Law School hosted a talk by Azer Bestavros, BU Professor of Computer Science and the Director of the Hariri Institute for Computing. Prof. Bestavros will detailed his groundbreaking research project regarding pay equity. In this project, he and his colleagues conducted a study of more than 170 employers in the Boston area, analyzing and reporting pay equity results without compromising any of the firms' confidentiality. The project - and the methodology - have broad implications well beyond the employment context

Speculative Concurrency Control for Real-Time Databases

In this paper, we propose a new class of Concurrency Control Algorithms that is especially suited for real-time database applications. Our approach relies on the use of (potentially) redundant computations to ensure that serializable schedules are found and executed as early as possible, thus, increasing the chances of a timely commitment of transactions with strict timing constraints. Due to its nature, we term our concurrency control algorithms Speculative. The aforementioned description encompasses many algorithms that we call collectively Speculative Concurrency Control (SCC) algorithms. SCC algorithms combine the advantages of both Pessimistic and Optimistic Concurrency Control (PCC and OCC) algorithms, while avoiding their disadvantages. On the one hand, SCC resembles PCC in that conflicts are detected as early as possible, thus making alternative schedules available in a timely fashion in case they are needed. On the other hand, SCC resembles OCC in that it allows conflicting transactions to proceed concurrently, thus avoiding unnecessary delays that may jeopardize their timely commitment