CICS Doctoral Student Ryan McKenna Wins Third Place in Differential Privacy Synthetic Data Challenge

College of Computer and Informational Sciences doctoral student Ryan McKenna has recently won third place and a $5,000 prize in the National Institute of Standards and Technology's (NIST) first ever Differential Privacy Synthetic Data Challenge.

The competition tests participants' ability to identify and develop practical methods for creating differentially private synthetic data sets. The challenges include empirical evaluation of synthetic data generation on common tasks such as clustering, classification, and regression.

Ryan McKenna currently works in the Database Lab with Professor Gerome Miklau, where his research focuses on data privacy, machine learning, probabilistic modeling, and high-performance computing. In his free time, he enjoys functional programming, solving Project Euler problems, and analyzing baseball data.