Yiping Ma

Research Abstract:

Data-driven products have tremendous potential to save users time and money, but there has been prevailing concerns that the risks may outweigh the benefits---companies can observe how users obtain contents online or have them supply their data for service purposes. My research is to design cryptographic protocols and build systems that allow users to obtain or supply data in a way that does not violate their privacy while maintaining the functionalities these products have. To this end, I develop new theoretical results for cryptographic techniques and system-level designs; these advancements allow us to push the efficiency of the cryptographic tools and expand their applicability to meet practical needs, and to deploy them under real-world scenarios with realistic assumptions.

Bio:

Yiping Ma is currently a PhD student in computer science at University of Pennsylvania, advised by Professor Sebastian Angel and Professor Tal Rabin. Her research interests include cryptography, security and privacy, and computer systems. She designs protocols and builds systems to protect user privacy in data-driven applications. Recently, she works on topics including private information retrieval, secure computation and federated learning. She is the recipient of Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship. Yiping completed her bachelor's degree at Peking University in 2020.