Carmela González Troncoso (born 1982 in Vigo) is a Spanish telecommunication engineer and researcher specialized in privacy issues, and an LGBT+ activist. She is currently a tenure track assistant professor at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland and the head of the SPRING lab (Security and Privacy Engineering Laboratory).[1][2] Troncoso gained recognition for her leadership of the European team developing the DP-3T protocol that aims at the creation of an application to facilitate the tracing of COVID-19 infected persons without compromising on the privacy of citizens.[3][4][5][6] Currently she is also member of the Swiss National COVID-19 Science Task Force in the expert group on Digital Epidemiology.[7] In 2020, she was listed among Fortune magazine's 40 Under 40.[8]

Carmela Troncoso
Carmela Troncoso in 2020
Born1982 (age 41–42)
CitizenshipSpain
Known forDP-3T protocol
Board member ofSwiss National COVID-19 Science Task Force
SpouseRebekah Overdorf
AwardsGoogle Security and Privacy Research Award
Fortune's 40und40
ERCIM WG STM Best Ph.D. Thesis Award (2011)
CNIL-INRIA Privacy Protection Award 2017
Academic background
Alma materUniversity of Vigo
KU Leuven
Academic work
DisciplineSoftware engineering
Sub-disciplineComputer security
Machine learning
InstitutionsÉcole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)
Main interestsMachine learning
Privacy evaluation
Engineering privacy-preserving systems
Websitehttps://www.epfl.ch/labs/spring/

Career

edit

Troncoso studied engineering at University of Vigo and in 2006 graduated in telecommunication engineering. She went to KU Leuven to work on her PhD on "Design and analysis methods for privacy technologies" under the supervision of Bart Preneel and Claudia Díaz.[9][10][11] She continued at KU Leuven as a post-doc before joining Gradiant, the Galician Research and Development Center in Advanced Telecommunications, as a Security and Privacy Technical Lead. In October 2015 Troncoso joined the IMDEA Software Institute (Spain) as faculty member.[12] Since November 2017 she has been a tenure track assistant professor at the SPRING lab (Security and Privacy Engineering Laboratory)[2] at the School of Computer and Communication Sciences[13] at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland.[1]

Research

edit

Troncoso's research focuses on technologies enabling the development of socially responsible systems such as machine learning, privacy evaluation and privacy-preserving systems:[2][10]

  • Machine learning: Troncoso studies the impact of machine learning algorithms on daily activities of contemporary society, both the improvements as well as the disadvantages. Employing machine learning she builds tools helping to enhance system designs and find ethical designs defending against machine learning-based attacks on privacy.
  • Privacy evaluation: Her lab performs research that helps user to authorize to better understand how much information they reveal, and to enable software developers to achieve their goals without endangering the privacy of users.
  • Engineering privacy-preserving systems: Troncoso also works on developing frameworks assisting engineers to build privacy-preserving systems and methodologies that allow them to assess in a systematic way about the design and the evaluation of privacy-preserving technologies.[2][10]

Based on her research, and together with International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) Troncoso developed the opensource collaborative data analysis tool Datashare.[14][15] Datashare was used in the analysis of the Luanda Leaks.[16][17]

Covid-19 pandemic

edit

In 2020, during the crisis of the Covid-19 pandemic, she leads a team of more than 30 people from eleven European institutions working to develop the DP-3T protocol under the umbrella of the Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (PEPP-PT) to create a computer application that tracks contacts and at the same time respects privacy with the aim of letting citizens know if they have been close to someone who days later tests positive for the virus.[18][4] She is first author of white paper on the application of the DP-3T protocol.[5] Google stated that it took inspiration from the DP-3T protocol.[6]

Through her work the DP-3T protocol and on the SwissCovid app system during the Covid-19 Troncoso was featured in several Swiss and international news outlets.[6][19][20][21][22][23][24] As an expert of the topic she also appeared on a number of panels and events such as the IMPACT2020 conference and the International Committee of the Red Cross' release of Data Protection Handbook for Humanitarian Action.[25][26][27][28]

Distinctions

edit

In September 2020, Troncoso joined the ranks of "40 influential people" (40 Under 40) in the category technology nominated by the Fortune magazine.[8]

Since 2020 Troncoso has been a member of the Swiss National COVID-19 Science Task Force, the scientific corona advisory board of the Swiss Federal Council and the cantons. She is a member of the expert group on Digital Epidemiology.[7][29]

She is an awardee of the ERCIM WG STM Best Ph.D. Thesis Award (2011),[30] the CNIL-INRIA Privacy Protection Award 2017 (Paper: Engineering privacy by design reloaded)[31] and the Google Security and Privacy Research Award (2019).[32]

Selected works

edit
  • Shokri, Reza; Theodorakopoulos, George; Troncoso, Carmela; Hubaux, Jean-Pierre; Le Boudec, Jean-Yves (2012). "Protecting location privacy". Proceedings of the 2012 ACM conference on Computer and communications security - CCS '12 (PDF). p. 617. doi:10.1145/2382196.2382261. ISBN 9781450316514. S2CID 3418446.
  • Gürses, S., Troncoso, C. and Diaz, C., 2011. Engineering privacy by design. Computers, Privacy & Data Protection, 14(3), p. 25. PDF.
  • Troncoso, C.; Danezis, G.; Kosta, E.; Balasch, J.; Preneel, B. (2011). "PriPAYD: Privacy-Friendly Pay-As-You-Drive Insurance" (PDF). IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing. 8 (5): 742–755. doi:10.1109/TDSC.2010.71.
  • Shokri, Reza; Troncoso, Carmela; Diaz, Claudia; Freudiger, Julien; Hubaux, Jean-Pierre (2010). "Unraveling an old cloak". Proceedings of the 9th annual ACM workshop on Privacy in the electronic society - WPES '10 (PDF). p. 115. doi:10.1145/1866919.1866936. ISBN 9781450300964. S2CID 3714059.
  • Balasch, J., Rial, A., Troncoso, C., Preneel, B., Verbauwhede, I. and Geuens, C., 2010, August. PrETP: Privacy-Preserving Electronic Toll Pricing. In USENIX security symposium (Vol. 10, pp. 63–78). PDF.
  • Pyrgelis, A., Troncoso, C. and De Cristofaro, E., 2017. Knock knock, who's there? Membership inference on aggregate location data. arXiv preprint arXiv:1708.06145.
  • Balsa, Ero; Troncoso, Carmela; Diaz, Claudia (2012). "OB-PWS: Obfuscation-Based Private Web Search". 2012 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. pp. 491–505. doi:10.1109/SP.2012.36. ISBN 978-1-4673-1244-8. S2CID 3734059.
  • Mittal, P., Olumofin, F.G., Troncoso, C., Borisov, N. and Goldberg, I., 2011, August. PIR-Tor: Scalable Anonymous Communication Using Private Information Retrieval. In USENIX Security Symposium (p. 31). PDF.

References

edit
  1. ^ a b "Dr Carmela Troncoso named Tenure Track Assistant Professor". EPFL News. 10 June 2017. Retrieved 11 June 2020.
  2. ^ a b c d "The lab". www.epfl.ch. Retrieved 2020-08-21.
  3. ^ "First pilot for the Google and Apple-based decentralised tracing app". Swiss Science Today. Retrieved 11 June 2020.
  4. ^ a b "European coalition takes shape on coronavirus contact tracing". Reuters. 2020-05-07. Retrieved 2020-08-13.
  5. ^ a b Troncoso, Carmela; Payer, Mathias; Hubaux, Jean-Pierre; Salathé, Marcel; Larus, James; Bugnion, Edouard; Lueks, Wouter; Stadler, Theresa; Pyrgelis, Apostolos; Antonioli, Daniele; Barman, Ludovic; Chatel, Sylvain; Paterson, Kenneth; Čapkun, Srdjan; Basin, David; Beutel, Jan; Jackson, Dennis; Roeschlin, Marc; Leu, Patrick; Preneel, Bart; Smart, Nigel; Abidin, Aysajan; Gürses, Seda; Veale, Michael; Cremers, Cas; Backes, Michael; Tippenhauer, Nils Ole; Binns, Reuben; Cattuto, Ciro; et al. (May 24, 2020). "Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing" (PDF). GitHub. arXiv:2005.12273.
  6. ^ a b c Farr, Christina (2020-04-28). "How a handful of Apple and Google employees came together to help health officials trace coronavirus". CNBC. Retrieved 2020-08-21.
  7. ^ a b "ncs-tf.ch: Topics & Expert groups". ncs-tf.ch. Retrieved 2020-08-21.
  8. ^ a b "Carmela Troncoso | 2020 40 under 40 in Tech". Fortune. Retrieved 2020-09-16.
  9. ^ Troncos, Carmela. "Design and analysis methods for privacy technologies" (PDF). Retrieved 2020-08-21.
  10. ^ a b c "Carmela Troncoso's HomePage". carmelatroncoso.com. Retrieved 2020-08-12.
  11. ^ "Former members | COSIC" (in Dutch). Retrieved 2020-08-12.
  12. ^ "Carmela Troncoso - IMDEA Software Institute". software.imdea.org. Retrieved 2020-08-12.
  13. ^ "School of Computer and Communication Sciences". www.epfl.ch. Retrieved 2020-08-21.
  14. ^ "Datashare - ICIJ". datashare.icij.org. Retrieved 2020-08-21.
  15. ^ "'Trust and technology' at heart of latest collaborative journalism tool". ICIJ. 2020-08-17. Retrieved 2020-08-21.
  16. ^ "Luanda Leaks | Africa's richest woman exploited family ties, shell companies and inside deals". ICIJ. Retrieved 2020-08-21.
  17. ^ "How we mined more than 715,000 Luanda Leaks records". ICIJ. 3 February 2020. Retrieved 2020-08-21.
  18. ^ "HOME | PEPP-PT". Pepp Pt (in German). Archived from the original on 2020-04-09. Retrieved 2020-08-12.
  19. ^ MacNamee, Sara Ibrahim, Terence (25 June 2020). "Switzerland launches SwissCovid tracing app for residents". SWI swissinfo.ch. Retrieved 2020-08-12.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  20. ^ Femmes de science : Carmela Troncoso - Play RTS (in French), retrieved 2020-08-12
  21. ^ Colomé, Jordi Pérez (2020-04-15). "La ingeniera española que lidera la 'app' europea de rastreo de contagios: "No será un estado de vigilancia"". EL PAÍS (in Spanish). Retrieved 2020-08-12.
  22. ^ "EU privacy experts push a decentralized approach to COVID-19 contacts tracing". TechCrunch. 6 April 2020. Retrieved 2020-08-12.
  23. ^ Romero, por Sergio Muñoz (2020-08-21). "Privacidad y rastreo en la pandemia: la experta Carmela Troncoso explica por qué tu móvil puede ser (por ahora) la mejor vacuna". mujerhoy (in Spanish). Retrieved 2020-08-21.
  24. ^ "Doublement protégé - Portrait | Migros Magazine". Migros Medien (in French). 2020-06-25. Retrieved 2020-08-20.
  25. ^ "Pandemic - Responsible Data Summit 2020". responsibledata.ai. Retrieved 2020-08-21.
  26. ^ "ImPACT 2020: PACT Project Holds First Collaborative, Virtual Workshop to Tackle Key Technical Issues in Private Automated Contact Tracing". Internet Policy Research Initiative at MIT. 2020-04-16. Retrieved 2020-08-21.
  27. ^ "s-212 Panel Discussion on Contact Tracing at Eurocrypt 2020". YouTube. 2020-05-14. Retrieved 2020-08-21.
  28. ^ "Data Protection in the Time of COVID-19". International Committee of the Red Cross. 2020-05-26. Retrieved 2020-08-21.
  29. ^ "ncs-tf.ch: Organisation". ncs-tf.ch. Retrieved 2020-09-14.
  30. ^ "ERCIM Working group". www.iit.cnr.it. Retrieved 2020-08-12.
  31. ^ "Inria and the CNIL award the 2017 privacy protection prize to a European research team | CNIL". www.cnil.fr. Retrieved 2020-08-12.
  32. ^ Luterbacher, Celia (February 22, 2019). "Carmela Troncoso wins Google Security and Privacy Research Award". Retrieved April 19, 2021.
edit