Schedule, Fall 2005

Date Speaker Topic and Paper Reference
Sep 14 No Speaker
Sep 21 Robi I can speak about "Approximating edit distance efficiently". I plan to present the two sketching algorithms in a paper by Ziv Bar-Yossef, T.S. Jayram, myself, and Ravi Kumar.
Sep 28 Kamalika I will follow up on Robi's talk last week by presenting "Low Distortion Embeddings for Edit Distances", Ostrovsky and Rabani, STOC 2005. This paper provides an embedding of the edit distance metric on a hypercube into l_1, with distortion at most 2^{O(\sqrt{\log d \log \log d})}.
Oct 5 David Molnar Next week I'll talk about...another paper by R. Ostrovsky! This one is joint work with William Skeith and considers "private searching on streaming data." Abstract and link follows.

I am curious whether these results can be combined with work on "streaming reductions," as defined by this paper . But I will focus first on making sure we all understand the basic paper.

Private Searching on Streaming Data

In this paper, we consider the problem of private searching on streaming data, where we can efficiently implement searching for documents under a secret criteria (such as presence or absence of a hidden combination of hidden keywords) under various cryptographic assumptions. Our results can be viewed in a variety of ways: as a generalization of the notion of a Private Information Retrieval (to the more general queries and to a streaming environment as well as to public-key program obfuscation); as positive results on privacy-preserving datamining; and as a delegation of hidden program computation to other machines.

The paper can be obtained here .

Oct 12 Kamalika Embedding block edit distances into l1 with low distortion
Oct 19 Cancelled
Oct 26 Cancelled
Nov 2
Nov 9 Jittat
Nov 16
Nov 25 Thanksgiving Week!
Dec 2
Dec 9
Dec 16 Finals Week!