New Interdisciplinary Center on Privacy with Postdoc Positions

Our first guest blog (which is more of an announcement) comes from Cynthia Dwork. You can email Cynthia if you want to learn more …

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An inter-disciplinary group of researchers based at Stanford University, UC Berkeley, and Microsoft Research, Silicon Valley, invites applications for two-year postdoctoral fellowships under the Sloan foundation-sponsored project “Towards Practicing Privacy”. The project involves the study, development and implementation of mathematically rigorous privacy protection technology that can be used to facilitate the data access for economists and medical researchers, and accommodate statistical data analyses performed by empirical researchers in these fields.  The ultimate goal of the project is to understand and, it is hoped, to overcome the obstacles to the practical implementation of differentially private data analysis of large datasets used by social scientists and medical researchers.

The project is led by Dr. Cynthia Dwork, distinguished scientist at Microsoft Research, Prof. John Mitchell, professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, and Prof. Denis Nekipelov, assistant professor of Economics at UC Berkeley. The advisory members of the project include Prof. Steven Brenner, professor of Plant and Microbial Biology at UC Berkeley and Prof. David Card, professor of Economics at UC Berkeley.

A broad range of applicants will be considered: computer scientists with expertise in private data analysis or privacy-preserving systems, researchers in theoretical and applied econometrics, as well as applied data-driven fields including industrial organization and labor economics, and researchers in bioinformatics.  Salary will be competitive with academic postdoctoral salaries in Computer Science, commensurate with experience.

Completed applications received by April 1, 2012, will receive full consideration.  Applications received after the deadline will be considered until the position is filled. The application should include the following: Cover letter, CV, up to three sample research papers, and three letters of recommendation.   Materials should be sent to lynda@cs.stanford.edu.