Colloquium Details
Human-Centered Tools for Protecting Privacy Across the Data Ecosystem
Speaker: Priyanka Nanayakkara, Harvard University
Location: 370 Jay St 825
Date: March 25, 2026, 11 a.m.
Host:
Synopsis:
Technical approaches for protecting data privacy have immense potential to safeguard sensitive data and thus create critical infrastructure for responsible data science and AI. However, these emerging approaches are largely disconnected from on-the-ground practice, limiting their adoption and opportunities for real-world feedback. Furthermore, protecting privacy at scale requires people with distinct roles, responsibilities, and needs to all integrate novel practices into their already-challenging routines. In this talk, I will describe my approach to enabling people across the data ecosystem to protect data privacy & security by presenting three projects that develop interactive, visual tools that align differential privacy—a state-of-the-art approach to privacy-preserving data science and AI—with how data curators and data subjects naturally reason about data. This includes research that formed the seeds for a $1.5m NSF grant I co-authored and informed a tool that the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology has formally proposed hosting. Finally, I will discuss promising directions for future work that continue to leverage a human-centered strategy to advance data privacy & security.
Speaker Bio:
Priyanka Nanayakkara is a postdoctoral fellow in computer science at Harvard University, co-hosted by Professors Salil Vadhan and Martin Wattenberg. During the 2024-25 academic year, she was a fellow at Harvard’s Center for Research on Computation and Society. Her research at the intersection of data privacy & security, human-computer interaction (HCI), and visualization develops human-centered tools that align technical approaches for data privacy with how people naturally reason about data. Her work—published in top privacy & security and HCI venues like USENIX Security, IEEE S&P, CHI, and CSCW—is supported in part by a $1.5m NSF grant she co-authored and has recently informed a privacy tool that the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology has formally proposed hosting. She holds a joint PhD in computer science and communication from Northwestern University, advised by Professor Jessica Hullman. During her PhD, she was also a visiting graduate student at UC Berkeley’s Simons Institute, a visiting researcher at Columbia University, and an intern at Microsoft Research. She is an MIT EECS Rising Star and UCSD/Stanford/UChicago Data Science Rising Star.
Notes:
In-person attendance only available to those with active NYU ID cards.