James R. Thompson Lecture Featured speaker
Dr. Xiao-Li Meng
Whipple V. N. Jones Professor of Statistics
Harvard University
Read lecture abstract
This talk traces the concept of privacy from a late 19th-century legal right—spurred by tabloid harassment—to today's digital age challenges. It highlights Differential Privacy (DP), a cryptography-based method designed to balance data privacy and utility in a quantified way. However, despite DP's advancements and explicit warnings (e.g., Kifer and Machanavajjhala, 2011 “No free lunch in data privacy”; Tschantz et al, 2022, “SoK: Differential privacy as a causal property”), misconceptions about its resistance to adversaries' prior knowledge persist. By revisiting Warner's (1965, JASA) randomized response mechanism, we argue that this misperception lies in treating data as static objects, rather than realizations of underlying, typically interdependent attributes or variables. We show how DP's effectiveness can falter when adversaries exploit interdependencies among individuals—similar to how quarantining only symptomatic individuals fails to stop an airborne disease. A holistic statistical perspective on joint modeling data is therefore as crucial for data privacy as for data analysis. (Joint work with James Bailie and Ruobin Gong.)
The Department of Statistics at Rice University has established the James R. Thompson Distinguished Lecture Series and the James R. Thompson Student Award in Statistics to honor the life of the Rice professor and founding chair of our department in 1987.
The goal of the series is to bring to campus internationally recognized scholars in the field of statistics to deliver talks to multidisciplinary audiences on topics of broad interest. The lecture series is supported by an endowed James R. Thompson Memorial Fund through the generous contributions of family, friends, and colleagues. This series is NISS Sponsored and Affiliate Award Fund Eligible.
The James R. Thompson Student Award is presented to the recipient(s) at the annual lecture event.
Past Lectures
- 2024 - "Statistics and the Fair Administration of Justice" - Alicia Carriquiry, Distinguished Professor and President's Chair, Director of the Center of Statistics and Applications in Forensic Evidence Iowa State University
- 2023 - "Data Science To Address The Health Impacts Of Climate Change" - Francesca Dominici, Director of the Harvard Data Science Initiative, at Harvard University and the Clarence James Gamble Professor of Biostatistics, Population and Data Science at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
- 2022 - "Probabilistic Sea-Ice Forecasting" - Adrian Raftery, Boeing International Professor of Statistics & Sociology Founding Director, Center of Statistics and Social Sciences, University of Washington in Seattle
- 2019 - "Simulation: A plot twist" - Mark Hansen, Director, David and Helen Gurley Brown Institute for Media Innovation & Professor of Journalism, Columbia Journalism School
- 2018 - "The Critical Role of Statistics in Evaluating Forensic Evidence" - Karen Kafadar, University of Virginia
