Short biography: I hold currently the Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) in Privacy-preserving and Ethical Analysis of Big Data since December 2017. I have joined the Computer Science Department of the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) in January 2016, after having held a joint Research chair in Security of Information Systems between Université de Rennes 1 and Inria from September 2009 to December 2015. Before that, I was a CNRS postdoctoral researcher in LAAS-CNRS collaborating with Yves Deswarte on the concept of the “privacy-preserving identity card”, after having defending in 2008 my PhD thesis in computer science at the Université de Montréal under the supervision of Gilles Brassard. I have defended in June 2014 my HDR (Habilitation à Diriger les Recherches) titled “Protection of Privacy in the Information Society”. I am a member of the LATECE laboratory as well as the SERENE RISC cybersecurity network.

Research interests: My main research area is the Protection of Privacy, with a particular strong focus on location privacy. I have also studied and contributed to privacy research in the following contexts : differential privacy, privacy issues in social networks, privacy in distributed systems, privacy-preserving data mining and privacy-preserving identity management.

To draw an analogy with computer security, on the “attack” side, I have investigated the privacy issues raised by the development of information technologies (e.g., location-based services), studying the potential inferences that can be performed on the data collected by such services or the security weaknesses existing in their design. On the “defense” side, I have worked on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) enabling users to have a better control on their personal data.

I am also interested to solve long-term scientific questions such as addressing the tension between privacy and the analysis of Big Data as well as the fairness, accountability and transparency issues raised by personalized systems.

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