MIT, White House co-sponsor workshop on big-data privacy
On Monday, MIT hosted a daylong workshop on big data and privacy, co-sponsored by the White House as part of a 90-day review of data privacy policy that President Barack Obama announced in a Jan. 17 speech on U.S. intelligence gathering. White House Counselor John Podesta, grounded by snow in Washington, delivered his keynote address and took questions over the phone. But Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker was on hand, as were MIT President L. Rafael Reif and a host of computer scientists from MIT, Harvard University, and Microsoft Research, who spoke about the technical challenges of protecting privacy in big data sets.In his brief opening remarks, Reif mentioned the promise of big data and the difficulties that managing it responsibly pose, and he offered the example of MIT’s online-learning initiative, MITx, to illustrate both. “We want to study the huge quantities of data about how MITx students interact with...