National Institute of Statistical Sciences

1. RESEARCH. Work at NISS continues to construct a prototype table server. Functioning, scalable code exists to manipulate tables, to calculate marginal subtables and to perform both
   
   
   • IPF reconstruction of the entire underlying table
     
     
   • Computation of bounds for all non-zero entries in the underlying table, using the "shuttle algorithm"
   
   from arbitrary sets of released marginals. The next steps are to create a command line user interface (to accept and process queries for marginal tables) and the query history database.
   
   
   
2. PRESENTATIONS
   
   
   • April 18-19, 2001, at the Digital Government Workshop (Washington): Ashish Sanil and Alan Karr: The NASS System for Confidentiality-Preserving Geographical Aggregation
     [Stephen Fienberg also attended the workshop.]
     
     
   • April 27, 2001, at the University of Texas at Austin: George Duncan: Data Swapping: Mapping Confidentiality Disclosure Risk Vs. Data Utility [available at www.niss.org/dg/presentations.html]

   
   Upcoming presentations include dg.o 2001 (Los Angeles, May), the ASA Spring
   Research Conference (Roanoke, June) and the ISI (Seoul, August).
   
   
   

3. TECHNICAL REPORT

   • Web-Based Systems that Disseminate Information but Protect Confidential Data, Alan F. Karr and Ashish P. Sanil (to be presented at dg.o 2001) [available at www.niss.org/dg/technicalreports.html]
     
     
     

4. POSTDOCTORAL APPOINTMENT. Shanti Gomatam will be joining NISS as a postdoc in September, 2001. Shanti is a 1995 Ph.D. recipient from Florida State University, has had previous postdoctoral experience at the University of Florida, and is currently a member of the Department of Mathematics at the University of South Florida. She will be working on the project, in part as an extension of her previous research on record linkage.