Title: Privacy with Constrained Additive Noise: Application to Smart Meter Privacy

Speaker：Dr.Farhad Farokhi

Time and Venue：Sep 18,15:00-16:00， N702

Abstract: It is commonly understood that data from smart meters can be used by adversaries to infringe on the privacy of the households, e.g., figuring out the individual appliances that are being used or the level of the occupancy of the house. In this talk, batteries are used to preserve the privacy of households with smart meters. To solve this problem, a general framework for preserving the privacy of individual entries of a database with constrained additive noise is considered. In this framework, an adversary can submit arbitrary queries to an agent possessing the entire database and the agent returns a response to the query that is corrupted by an additive random noise whose support is a subset or equal to a constraint set. The Cramer-Rao bound is used to bound the variance of the estimation error of the database, which may be used by the adversary, to the trace of the inverse of the Fisher information matrix. A measure of privacy using the Fisher information matrix is developed. The probability density that minimizes the Fisher information (as a proxy for maximizing the measure of privacy) is computed.  Finally, the applicability of these results are demonstrated on real power measurement data with non-intrusive load monitoring algorithms.

Biography: Farhad Farokhi is a McKenzie Fellow at the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, the University of Melbourne, Australia. In 2014, he received his PhD degree in Automatic Control from KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden. Prior to that, he received his BSc and MSc degrees in Electrical Engineering (Automatic Control), respectively, in 2008 and 2010 from Sharif University of Technology, Iran. During his PhD studies, he was a visiting researcher at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Farhad has been the recipient of the 2015 Early Career Researcher Award from the University of Melbourne and a finalist in the 2014 European Embedded Control Institute (EECI) PhD Award. http://people.eng.unimelb.edu.au/ffarokhi