The Brandeis Program aims to enable individuals, enterprises, and U.S. government agencies to keep private and/or proprietary information private. Its purpose is to understand how to build information systems that can ensure private data can only be used for its intended purpose and no other.
The vision of the Brandeis program is to break the tension between (a) maintaining privacy and (b) being able to tap into the huge value of data. Rather than having to balance between them, Brandeis aims to build a third option, enabling safe and predictable sharing of data in which privacy is preserved.
The goal of the Brandeis program is to develop tools and techniques that enable systems to be built in which private data may be technologically protected so that it can only be used for its intended purpose and no other. It seeks to restructure our relationship with data by shifting the mechanisms for data protection to the data owner rather than the data user. The primary focus of the Brandeis program is to protect data that is knowingly provided to a third party, as opposed to data collected as a byproduct of interacting with the network or a system.
The program has four technical areas (TAs):
TA1. Privacy-preserving Computation - The Brandeis program seeks to address the practical limitations of computational privacy mechanisms so that they may be used in practical systems;
TA2. Human Data Interaction (HDI) - In the Brandeis program, technologies will be developed that help a data owner to make choices about data use;
TA3. Experimental Systems - The goal of the Brandeis program is to learn how to build privacy-aware systems. Technical Area 3 (TA3) is where this finds practical fulfillment; and
TA4. Metrics and Analysis - Performers in TA4 will engage in research to develop a set of metrics that can be used to quantify the privacy benefits and costs of a system, and will develop analysis tools to assess the efficacy and cost of the privacy technologies as they are used by the TA1, TA2 and TA3 research teams in the experimental systems.
Performers in all four of the TAs will be required work cooperatively in the context of tightly coupled collaborative research teams created under the general oversight of the Government. Each collaborative research team will be centered around one of the TA3 Experimental Systems and may contain multiple TA1, TA2, and TA4 performers. Performers in TA1 and TA2 will be required to tune their research activities to support the needs of the experimental systems being developed by the TA3 performer on their collaborative research team. Similarly, performers in TA4 will use the TA3 experimental systems being developed within their team as a test bed to exercise their metrics and analysis tools. In turn, TA3 performers will tune their plans for their experimental systems to optimize the research opportunities for the TA1, TA2, and TA4 performers to the extent that such flexibility makes sense in the context of the systems being built.