Dr. XIAO Xiaokui has been selected as the Winner of Physical/Mathematical Science for 2009 Young Scientist Awards by Hong Kong Institution of Science. (11/2009)

Congratulation to Dr. XIAO Xiaokui, a PhD student supervised by Prof. Tao Yufei, has been selected as the Winner of Physical/Mathematical Science for 2009 Young Scientist Awards by Hong Kong Institution of Science.

The Hong Kong Institution of Science (HKIS) was established in 1992 to foster the development of science in Hong Kong and to facilitate the development of links with scientific communities in the Chinese mainland, Taiwan and overseas. The Institution has nearly 400 members covering the fields of physical science, life science, engineering science and mathematics. It has been taking an active role in supporting the development of innovation and technology in Hong Kong.

Numerous organizations, like census bureaus and hospitals, maintain large collections of personal information (e.g., census data and medical records). Such data collections are of significant research value, and there is much benefit in making them publicly available. Nevertheless, as the data is sensitive in nature, proper measures must be taken to ensure that its publication does not endanger the privacy of the individuals that contributed the data. A canonical solution to this problem is to modify the data before releasing it to the public, such that the modification prevents inference of private information while retaining statistical characteristics of the data.

Dr. XIAO Xiaokui's paper entitled " Privacy preserving data publishing" has focused on developing practical modification techniques for privacy preserving data publishing. He explored various aspects of the problem, based on which he devised novel solutions that address important issues overlooked by previous work. The effectiveness and efficiency of his solutions were demonstrated in extensive experiments with real data.