The defense will take place on december 10th at 1:30 PM.

Title
Privacy issues in AI and geolocation: from data protection to user awareness

Abstract
The evolution of digital technologies and their increasing adoption have opened major opportunities, highly beneficial for society in general and for individuals in particular. However, it also poses considerable threats to privacy that require appropriate legal and ethical rules. Privacy is essential to protect individuals, for example against possible misuse of personal data. Privacy is also essential to protect society, as shown by the misuse of personal data to influence voters
during elections (e.g., Cambridge Analytica).
In this context of ultra-rapid development of technologies (often deployed before being regulated), my research work is focused on privacy protection. More precisely, I mainly contribute to the field by proposing technical solutions to privacy (by quantifying risks or proposing countermeasures for example), and also through transdisciplinary activities. Indeed, privacy issues cannot be solved by technology alone because they also raise legal, ethical, economic and societal questions that require a dialogue with people from different disciplines.
My main contributions cover 1) issues related to the collection, exploitation and protection of location data, and more recently 2) security and confidentiality of AI. In this second axis, I focused on “privacy considerations in ML”, i.e., the identification of risks related to ML technologies and countermeasures, and “exploiting ML for confidentiality”, using the capabilities of these new tools to protect individuals (with the use of language models for the anonymization of
medical reports for example).
To address these growing privacy issues, it is necessary to quantify the new risks fueled by new technologies and new usages, and to improve the safeguarding of users’ personal information by developing protection mechanisms. Finally, it is also necessary to both raise awareness among end users about the different risks in order to enable them to adapt
their use, and to collaborate with key players in the field to adopt best practices.

Jury
* Pr. Anne-Marie Kermarrec, EPFL
* Pr. Romain Rouvoy, Université de Lille (rapporteur)
* Dr. Aurélien Bellet, Inria (rapporteur)
* Dr. Catusci Palamidessi, Inria (rapporteuse)
* Pr. François Taiani, Université de Rennes 1
* Pr. Sébastien Monnet, Université Savoie Mont-Blanc
* Pr. Eddy Caron, Université Lyon 1
* Dr. Sonia Ben Mokhtar, CNRS, Insa-Lyon