PIPages
Labs

Joann Chen

San Diego State University, CA·Computer Science

Data provenance is a record of where data came from, who created it, and how it was used and changed. These records help organizations check data integrity, run security audits and follow privacy rules in healthcare, finance and government.

Fields

Computer Science

Mathematics & Statistics

Topics

differential privacy

data provenance

provenance graphs

Grants
1 known grant, through Sep 2027

What they work on

  1. Identify privacy risks in provenance-based machine learning anomaly detectors by applying property inference, membership inference and graph reconstruction attacks to them.
  2. Develop snapshot-level differential privacy for provenance graphs, a way of adding mathematical privacy protection whose guarantees match enterprise privacy policies, compliance requirements and performance needs.
  3. Design a subgraph synthesis method that generates differentially private synthetic provenance graphs while handling the dense correlations and large scale of real provenance data.

More about the research

Provenance is often stored as a graph, a network of linked events and data items. Detailed provenance graphs, however, can reveal sensitive information and can be attacked. Differential privacy is a mathematical method that limits how much any single person's data affects an analysis's results. It protects even against attackers who know a lot, but in practice it is hard to keep data useful while keeping it private.

Why it matters

Hospitals, banks and public safety agencies keep detailed data activity records for audits and regulatory compliance, but those records can expose sensitive information. Practical differential privacy for provenance graphs could let these organizations keep using provenance for security monitoring while lowering privacy risks. Privacy-preserving synthetic datasets could also be shared more safely.

Known grants

From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.

CRII: SaTC: Foundations for Differentially Private Provenance

NSF · Oct 2025 – Sep 2027

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Assefaw Gebremedhin

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Develop robust and trustworthy machine learning algorithms with anomaly-detection features that flag malicious activity in AI systems used in healthcare, autonomous vehicles and smart cities.

The school

San Diego State University: 13 labs on PI Pages, $182M a year on research, 142 research doctorates a year.

More about San Diego State University

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