«Data Protection for Personalized Health»

Prof. Jean-Pierre Hubaux

Head of Laboratory for Data Security (LDS)
Academic Director of the Center for Digital Trust (C4DT)
School of Computer and Communication Sciences EPFL

«Data Protection for Personalized Health»

With the fast development of -omics, the biomed community is facing an unprecedented challenge in terms of data protection. In this talk, we will explain why existing information security solutions, such as the ones used in the financial sector, are not sufficient in this case. We will then refine the data protection requirements of P4 medicine and show how modern protection techniques, including homomorphic encryption, secure multi-party computation, differential privacy and private blockchains, can help responding to this challenge, even at very large scale. We will talk about the privacy precautions to be taken before deploying medical apps. We will describe the SPHN/PHRT DPPH project (dpph.ch) as well as the MedCo toolbox (medco.epfl.ch) under experimental deployment at HUG, CHUV and Inselspital, for secure medical data sharing. We will also describe the ongoing collaborations with Harvard Medical School. Finally, we will summarize the data-protection activities of GA4GH.

Biography
Jean-Pierre Hubaux is a full professor at EPFL. Through his research, he contributes to laying the foundations and developing the tools for protecting privacy in tomorrow’s hyper-connected world. He has pioneered the areas of privacy and security in mobile/wireless networks and in personalized health.

He is the academic director of Center for Digital Trust (c4dt.org).

He leads the ETH-funded project Data Protection in Personalized Health (DPPH) and is a co-chair of the Data Security Work Stream of the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH). He is a Fellow of both IEEE (2008) and ACM (2010). He is among the most cited researchers in privacy protection and in information security.