Abstract

Although information sharing is a key in smart cities, there is a heightened concern in data privacy nowadays. Are smart cities just glorified smart prisons? Can we offer assurance of privacy in smart cities without comprising users’ private data, while providing smart optimization and planning of urban resources and services? In this talk, I will present several recent projects of privacy-preserving applications in smart cities. First, I enable privacy-preserving collaborative consumption. I consider privacy-preserving facility and communal service sharing, in which an operator is only provided by an aggregate schedule of all users but not the personal schedules of individual users. More importantly, the users are still able to settle cost-sharing among themselves in a fair manner without knowing each other’s private demand. Second, I apply privacy-preserving mechanisms to energy storage sharing in smart grid, where an energy storage operator provides third-party energy storage services to optimize users’ consumption cost under a time-of-use (ToU) pricing plan subject to energy storage operation constraints. Third, I provide integrated privacy-preserving participatory crowdsensing in general smart city applications. Lastly, I will make a connection of my research to blockchain and smart contract.

Bio:

Sid Chi-Kin Chau is with Research School of Computer Science at the Australian National University. He was an Associate Professor with the Masdar Institute, UAE , which was established in collaboration with MIT . His primary research area is Internet-of-Things and cyber-physical systems for smart cities and smart energy systems, including smart grid, smart buildings, intelligent vehicles and transportation. He also researches in broad areas of wireless communications, algorithms, and big data analytics. He received the Ph.D. from University of Cambridge. Further information about his research can be found at http://www.SmartSustainability.org/