Coin from 193 AD. Providentia raising right hand towards star. Source: Classical Numismatic Group, Inc.     

Providentia

The Providentia project is led by professor Rasmus Pagh, hosted at DIKU, University of Copenhagen, and part of BARC. It is funded by a generous grant from Novo Nordisk Fonden. The project runs from January 2022 to December 2026. The team will include (at least) 4 PhD students and 2 post-docs.

The aim of the project is to improve theory and practice of differentially private algorithms, with special emphasis on distributed settings. It revolves around four themes:

  1. Avoiding exchange of raw data
  2. Combining cryptographic primitives with differential privacy methods
  3. Privacy and robustness in machine learning
  4. Privacy-utility trade-offs, with focus on novel privacy models
In all of these, algorithmic efficiency will be a core concern.

People

Alumni

Selected recent papers

Teaching and outreach

The name

In ancient Rome the goddess Providentia personified the ability to foresee events and make suitable provision. In this spirit, the Providentia project seeks to provide the forethought needed for scientists to make use of valuable sources of insight, even if data contains sensitive information. The name is also a near-acronym of Privacy-driven Trust in Algorithms.

Group photo showing, from left to right, Christian Lebeda, Fabrizio Boninsegna, Jacob Imola, Rasmus Pagh, Joel Andersson, Lukas Retschmeier, and Hao Wu