Almaden Institute

Querying Databases Privately Abstract: In this talk, I will introduce the Private Information Retrieval (PIR) problem. In this problem, a user wishes to query a database in a way that keeps secretly the identity of the data item(s) the user is interested in. I will present several approaches to the problem, mention the best currently-known solutions as well as possible research directions that are needed in order to make these solutions closer to being practical.   Eyal Kushilevitz - Bio  Eyal Kushilevitz  Professor, Computer Science  Technion - Israel Institute of Technology  eyalk@cs.technion.ac.il  Web Sites  http://www.cs.technion.ac.il/~eyalk/ Biography Since 1993, professor at the Computer Science Department, Technion. 1998—2000 Visiting Scientist, IBM T.J. Watson 1991—1993 PostDoc Harvard University 1991— Ph.D. from the Computer Science Department, Technion