We are happy to announce that Professor Amr El Abbadi, University of California at Santa Barbara, will visit us in Mid-April. Professor El Abbadi will give one HAIC talk and two lectures. The goal in these talks is to demonstrate how private access of data, using sophisticated, expensive but secure cryptographic methods can become a practical reality in the near future. The focus is on supporting oblivious queries and thus hide any associated access patterns on both private and public data. To get the most out of the lectures, please try to attend both in sequence as the second lecture builds on material covered in the first lecture.
Wednesday 17.4. HAIC Talk: Challenges and Practical Approaches to Design Private and Scalable Information Data Management Systems
Friday 19.4. Lecture 1: Towards Scalable and Practical Privacy Preserving Information Retrieval
Tuesday 23.4. Lecture 2: Towards Scalable and Practical Privacy Preserving Information Retrieval
About the speaker: Amr El Abbadi is a Professor of Computer Science. He received his B. Eng. from Alexandria University, Egypt, and his Ph.D. from Cornell University. His research interests are in the fields of fault-tolerant distributed systems and databases, focusing recently on Cloud data management, blockchain based systems and privacy concerns. Prof. El Abbadi is an ACM Fellow, AAAS Fellow, and IEEE Fellow. He was Chair of the Computer Science Department at UCSB from 2007 to 2011. He served as Associate Graduate Dean at the University of California, Santa Barbara from 2021–2023. He has served as a journal editor for several database journals, including, The VLDB Journal, IEEE Transactions on Computers and The Computer Journal. He has been Program Chair for multiple database and distributed systems conferences, including most recently SIGMOD 2022. He currently serves on the executive committee of the IEEE Technical Committee on Data Engineering (TCDE) and was a board member of the VLDB Endowment from 2002 to 2008. In 2007, Prof. El Abbadi received the UCSB Senate Outstanding Mentorship Award for his excellence in mentoring graduate students. In 2013, his student, Sudipto Das received the SIGMOD Jim Gray Doctoral Dissertation Award. Prof. El Abbadi is also a co-recipient of the Test of Time Award at EDBT/ICDT 2015. He has published over 350 articles in databases and distributed systems and has supervised over 40 PhD students.