Speaker: Dr. Siu Ming Yiu

Title: How to compute the edit distance of two strings securely

时间：3月13日（周四）  16:00- 17:00

地点：海韵校区行政楼C510

Abstract:

In this talk, we consider the following well-known problem in the setting of pattern matching. Alice holds a string A and Bob holds a string B. They want to know the edit distance of the two strings, however, both do not want the other to know what string he/she holds.

This problem belongs to a challenging research area of security, namely secure multiparty computation. In reality, company X may hold a database of customers and company Y may hold another database of his customers. They want to collaborate and combine their databases to obtain some important marketing statistics such as what the age range of customers that like iPhone more than Samsung. In this case, they need to compute the statistics in a secure manner without letting the other party to know the details of their databases. We assume that the audience may have some basic knowledge on RSA and dynamic programming.

Bio:

Dr Yiu is current an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science of the University of Hong Kong. He is leading the applied cryptography research group in the Center for Information Security and Cryptography and is also the deputy executive director of the HKU-BGI Bioinformatics Algorithms & Core Technology Research Laboratory (BAL).

He published extensively in both areas of security and bioinformatics.

He is the principal investigator of a number of Government funded research projects including an NSFC-RGC research project (only 23 projects were funded each year). He also won many awards in both teaching and research, for examples, the Research Output Prize of the Faculty of Engineering in 2006 and the Outstanding Teaching Award of the University of Hong Kong in 2009.