Cloud based estimation and control with privacy
Astor Visiting Lecture
Emerging systems such as smart grids or intelligent transportation systems often require end-user applications to continuously send information to external data aggregators performing monitoring or control tasks. This can result in an undesirable loss of privacy for the users in exchange of the benefits provided by the application. Mo- tivated by this trend, this paper introduces privacy concerns in a system theoretic context, and addresses the problem of releasing filtered signals that respect the privacy of the user data streams. Our approach relies on a formal notion of privacy from the database literature, called differential privacy, which provides strong privacy guarantees against adversaries with arbitrary side information. Methods are developed to approximate a given filter by a differentially private version, so that the distortion introduced by the privacy mechanism is minimized. Two specific scenarios are considered. First, the notion of differential privacy is extended to dynamic systems with many participants con- tributing independent input signals. Kalman filtering is also discussed in this context, when a released output signal must preserve differential privacy for the measured signals or state trajectories of the individual participants. Second, differentially private mechanisms are described to approximate stable filters when participants contribute to a single event stream, extending previous work on differential privacy under continual observation. The talk will conclude by focusing on the the case of cloud based optimization with privacy which is motivated by problems in electric vehicle charging.
Date: 11 October 2018, 16:00 (Thursday, 1st week, Michaelmas 2018)
Venue: Thom Building, Parks Road OX1 3PJ
Venue Details: LR2
Speaker: Prof George Pappas (University of Pennsylvania)
Organising department: Department of Engineering Science
Organisers: Professor Kostas Margellos (University of Oxford), Professor Antonis Papachristodoulou (University of Oxford)
Organiser contact email address: kostas.margellos@eng.ox.ac.uk
Hosts: Professor Kostas Margellos (University of Oxford), Professor Antonis Papachristodoulou (University of Oxford)
Part of: Control Seminar Series
Booking required?: Not required
Audience: Members of the University only
Editor: Kostas Margellos