Smart Cities with Privacy Assurance

1st event

Date: Friday 6th March, 2:00 to 3:00PM

Title: Smart Cities with Privacy Assurance

Guest speaker: Professor Sid Chi-Kin Chau from Australian National University.

 

Sid Chi-Kin Chau is a Senior Lecturer with Research School of Computer Science at the Australian National University. He was an Associate Professor with the Masdar Institute, UAE, which was established in collaboration with MIT. His primary research areas are in Internet-of-Things and cyber-physical systems for smart cities and smart energy systems. He also researches in broad areas of wireless communications, algorithms, and big data analytics. Previously, He was a visiting professor with MIT, and a senior research fellow with A*STAR in Singapore. He received the Ph.D. from University of Cambridge and B.Eng. from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He was a TPC co-chair of ACM e-Energy 2018 and Guest Editors for IEEE IoT Journal and IEEE Journal of Selected Areas in Communications

Abstract:

Although information sharing is a key in smart cities, there is a heightened concern in data privacy nowadays. Are smart cities just glorified smart prisons? Can we offer assurance of privacy in smart cities without comprising users’ private data, while enabling smart optimization and planning of urban resources and services? In this talk, I will present several projects of privacy-preserving applications in smart cities. First, we enable privacy-preserving collaborative consumption in sharing economy. We consider privacy-preserving facility and communal service sharing, in which an operator is only provided by an aggregate schedule of all users but not the personal schedules of individual users. More importantly, the users are still able to settle cost-sharing among themselves in a fair manner without knowing each other’s private demands. Second, we apply privacy-preserving mechanisms to energy storage sharing in smart grid, where an energy storage operator provides third-party energy storage services to optimize users’ consumption cost under a time-of-use (ToU) pricing plan subject to energy storage operation constraints. Third, we enable integrated privacy-preserving data cleansing, aggregation and dissemination to incentivize participatory crowdsensing in general smart city applications.