Congratulations to Assistant Professor Salim El Rouayheb for receiving the prestigious 2018 Google Faculty Research Award for his project titled "Towards efficient Single-Server Private Information Retrieval and Search." The Google Faculty Research Awards Program aims to recognize and support world-class faculty members pursuing cutting-edge research in areas of mutual interest to Google, with the goal of identifying and strengthening long-term collaborative relationships with faculty working on problems that will impact how future generations use technology. Google Faculty Research Awards are structured as seed funding to support one graduate student for one year and are awarded as an unrestricted gift. The award is highly competitive - only 15% of applicants receive funding - and each proposal goes through a rigorous Google-wide review process.
As part of this project, Dr. El Rouayheb has received a $ 89,096 award to study efficient single-server Private Information Retrieval (PIR) algorithms. PIR algorithms allow users to search an online search engine without revealing what they are searching for and thus protecting their privacy. This project addresses challenges in PIR by focusing on low-complexity single-server algorithms that leverage the users' previous queries and searches using tools from information theory and differential privacy. The obtained algorithms have the potential to be implemented in Google applications, such as Google Search and Google Drive, to provide desirable privacy guarantees without performance degradation.
Congratulations Salim!