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Systems Lunch - Privacy Compliance as a First-Class System Design Principle

05 May
Friday, 05/05/2023 12:00pm to 1:00pm
Lederle Graduate Research Center, Room A311
Systems Lunch

Abstract: Privacy laws like the European Union's GDPR or the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) give users rights over their data, such as the rights to access and erasure. Compliance with these laws is critical for organizations, but today developers must manually write code to achieve it. In this talk, I will describe our work on creating tools and software systems that help developers get privacy compliance right.

In particular, I will focus on K9db, a new, MySQL-compatible database built around users' data ownership and rights as a first-class design principle. This requires K9db to capture and enforce applications' complex data ownership and sharing semantics, but in exchange simplifies privacy compliance. Using a small set of schema annotations, K9db infers storage organization and procedures for data retrieval and deletion, and also reports compliance errors if an application risks violating privacy law requirements. Evaluation with several web applications shows that K9db helps developers get privacy compliance right while also matching or exceeding the performance of existing storage systems.

Bio: Malte Schwarzkopf is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Brown University, where he leads the ETOS group. Malte's research is on new abstractions that deliver efficient, easy-to-use, and trustworthy computer systems. Recent projects include systems to make web services privacy-compliant by construction, high-performance remote memory, and JIT-compiling Python data science pipelines. Malte is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award, a Google Research Award, Brown University's Henry Merritt Wriston Fellowship and Richard B. Salomon Award, and his past work received best paper awards at NSDI and EuroSys. Prior to Brown, Malte was a postdoc with MIT's PDOS group and completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge. He is still getting used to not living in a city called Cambridge.

The Systems Lunch talk series organized by Emery Berger is back in person! All talks are Fridays at 12:00 pm Eastern in room A311 (LGRC). Systems Lunch is a great opportunity to hear exciting talks by visitors as well as to learn about projects going on in the College. Everyone interested in systems is welcome to attend.