Clifton Recognized as ACM Distinguished Member

12-06-2017

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) recently recognized Professor Chris Clifton as a distinguished member. Cited for his scientific contributions to computing, Clifton is one of 43 members upon whom the ACM conferred distinguished status this year.

Clifton works on data privacy, particularly with respect to analysis of private data. This includes privacy-preserving data mining, data de-identification and anonymization, and limits on identifying individuals from data mining models. He also works on database support for widely distributed and autonomously controlled information, particularly issues related to data privacy.

He is interested in privacy technology – in particular, techniques to support data analysis while minimizing privacy risk. He has done considerable work in privacy-preserving data mining, and other techniques for data analysis without data disclosure – finding ways to analyze data without looking at it. His work includes cryptographic techniques, anonymization, differential privacy and other methods.

From September 2013-December 2015, Clifton served as a program director at the National Science Foundation in the Information and Integration and Informatics cluster, also working with the Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace Program. Prior to joining the Purdue faculty in 2001, he was a principal scientist at MITRE Corporation and an assistant professor at Northwestern University.