Event

Interdisciplinary Talks on Cybersecurity: Preserving Genomic Data Sharing

  • Lieu

    LU

Please click on this link to connect on the day of the event.

With the help of rapidly developing technology, DNA sequencing is becoming less expensive.

Consequently, research in genomics has gained speed in paving the way to personalised (genomic) medicine, and geneticists need large collections of human genomes to further increase this speed. Furthermore, individuals are using their genomes to learn about their (genetic) predispositions to diseases, their ancestries, and even their compatibility with potential partners.

On the other hand, genomic data carries very sensitive information about the individual owner. By analyzing the DNA of someone it is now possible to learn about their disease predispositions, ancestries, and physical attributes. The threat to genomic privacy is magnified by the fact that a person’s genome is correlated to family members’ genomes. The Golden State killer case is an example of how such linkages can be used to bring justice to a killer, but shame to innocent family members involved in the police investigation.

This talk will help bioinformaticians better understand the privacy challenges of genomic data sharing, a crucial requirement to facilitate genomic data in research and treatment. I will discuss about privacy challenges and privacy-preserving solutions when:

  • an individual (data owner) shares their data with a data collector (a service provider or a public database);
  • a data collector shares statistical information about its database;
  • two or more data owners or data collectors (e.g., hospitals) share their data (or databases) with each other.

 

About Dr Erman Ayday

Erman Ayday is an Assistant Professor at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, USA and Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey. Before that, he was a Post Doctoral Researcher at EPFL Lausanne, Switzerland. He received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the Georgia Institute of Technology, in 2007 and 2011, respectively. His research interests include privacy-enhancing technologies (including big data and genomic privacy), data security and applied cryptography.