Postdoc Teresa Anna Steiner is one of this year’s Villum International Postdocs

One of the new Villum International Postdocs is Teresa Anna Steiner, Postdoc at DTU Compute. She receives a grant of 2.3 million for her research project 'Differential Privacy for String Algorithms and Data Structures'.

Teresa’s goal with this project is to develop tools for privately analyzing strings (sequential data) and to explore the theoretical (im)possibilities in the field.

The more data we collect every day, the more pressing is the need for tools which allow analyzing those data efficiently and ethically. This includes protecting the privacy of individual people whose data are being analyzed.

However, it is not always obvious what it means to protect someone’s privacy: Even if the name and other clearly identifying information are removed from a database, a resourceful adversary can find ways of uncovering personal data.