Faculty Friday – Azer Bestavros
Each week, Faculty Friday will highlight a member of our IOC Faculty Advisory Board by exploring their work at Boston University and their thoughts on cities.
This week, we’re speaking with Azer Bestavros. Azer serves as a Professor of Computer Science and Founding Director of the Hariri Institute for Computing.
IOC: What research or project are you currently working on?
Azer Bestavros (AB): I am currently working on a number of projects, but if I have to single out one project, it would be our work on privacy-preserving analytics using secure Multi-Party Computation (MPC). MPC is a cryptographic approach that allows the computation of any function without revealing any information about the inputs to that function, beyond what is revealed by the function itself. For example, if the state wants to compute some statistics on opioid addiction or on homelessness based on private records held by various organizations who are not willing (or allowed) to make such records public, or even to entrust them to a third party, then the use of MPC would allow us to compute such statistics without any risk of the private records being leaked. The mathematical underpinnings of MPC have been known for 35 years, yet MPC has not been used in practice, primarily because academics did not focus on tackling the real hurdles to deployment. There are many killer applications for MPC and our work is all about transitioning MPC to practice to tackle these applications, and so far we have had a lot of success. The most notable one is an application that came to us through IOC (thank you Katharine!) which allowed us to use MPC in a study seeking to identify salary inequities across various employee gender and ethnic groups at different levels of employment from executive to entry-level positions for a large number of employers in the city of Boston.
What’s your favorite thing about Boston University?
AB: The diversity of academic and professional fields and the appetite for interdisciplinary endeavors.
What is your favorite city, and why?
AB: Alexandria, Egypt, where I was born and grew up. Alexandria was the melting pot of the ancient world, and here I am living in Boston, the melting pot of the new world!
What do you think is the biggest challenge facing cities today?
AB: Lack of green space.
What do you think our cities of the future will look like?
AB: You should never ask a computer scientist about what things will look like in the future. First, we are not good at it, and second, we always try to make the future very different from what it is predicted to be!
If you were Mayor of Boston for a day and had unlimited resources, what program or project would you pursue and why?
AB: I would demolish all parking lots and metered spaces, replace them with green spaces, and make the only form of transportation electric, self-diving cars that ferry people around as needed.
Are there any urban-related issues that you want to see students and young people get more involved in?
AB: Yes: understand the implications from digital technologies and stand up for your rights to privacy. These two things are not in conflict. We can enjoy all the benefits of digital innovation without forgoing our right to privacy. This will not happen unless and until society demands it. I am worried that “young people” are being conditioned to accept a false choice. I am not sure this is an “urban related” issue, but those living in urban areas will be the most affected by invasion of privacy.
Want to learn more about Azer’s work? Be sure to follow him at Twitter at @Bestavros, visit the Hariri Institute for Computing’s website here and follow them at @BU_Computing. The Hariri Institute is also hosting a poster session for student research in urban data analytics today, Friday December 9th, from 2pm-5pm at their office, 111 Cummington Mall, Boston.