Statistical Disclosure Control

The CENEX project team

Institute	Short	Country	Flag
Statistics Netherlands	CBS	NL
Istituto Nationale di Statistica	ISTAT	It
Statistisches Bundesamt	DeStatis	DE
Office for National Statistics	ONS	UK
Universitat Rovira i Virgili	URV	ES
Statistical Office of the Republic of Slovenia	SORS	SL
Statistics Sweden	SCB	SW
Statistical Office of Estonia	ESA	ES
Statistic Austria	StatAu	AU

Statistics Netherlands

Anco Hundepool studied mathematics at Leyden University and subsequently he joined Statistics Netherlands. He started his career in the department for Statistical Methods. From the beginning he tried to build a link between the statistical methodology and the software development. His first project was in seasonal adjustment, which resulted a new tool for seasonal adjustment. Subsequent project were on the compilation of price index series and a pilot study to setup new statistics on purchasing power. After that he was one of the founding fathers of the Blaise system for the automation of large surveys. The Blaise system is now the world standard and is used by many NSIs’ for survey processing. After Blaise he became a project-leader for the Abacus tabulation package, linked to the Blaise system and subsequent the STATview dissemination package. The Statview package was the first version of Statistics Netherlands publication tool StatLine. In the TADEQ project for the documentation of electronic questionnaires (partially funded by the 4th Framework) he was responsible for the development of the TADEQ-software, a tool to automate the documentation of complex surveys. The last 10 years Statistical Disclosure Control became his major topic. This started with his involvement in the ARGUS-software. Within the SDC-project, partially funded by the 4th Framework he was the project-leader for the development of the ARGUS package for statistical disclosure control. In the 5th framework project CASC project he was the overall project leader and continues the development of the ARGUS software. Anco Hundepool presented his work on various international conferences and has published in different refereed journals. He was involved in the organisation of several conferences

Eric Schulte Nordholt studied mathematics at the University of Utrecht and econometrics at the Erasmus University Rotterdam. He started his career as a researcher at the Department of S tatistical Methods of Statistics Netherlands. In 1995 he worked as a detached national expert at the European Community Household Panel (ECHP) team of Eurostat in Luxembourg. Subsequently he became senior researcher at the Department of employees of the division of Socio-economic Statistics. His main interests are data editing, imputation, metadata systems, panel data and statistical disclosure control.

Peter-Paul de Wolf started to study mathematics at the Technical University of Delft in 1986. He graduated cum laude in the field of mathematical statistics in 1991 and received a VVS-grant for the best masters’ thesis of that year, in the statistics and operations research area. (VVS is the Dutch Society of Statistics and Operations Research) He started as a PhD-student in mathematical statistics in 1991, at the same university, on extreme value estimation. During the next four years, he gave courses on linear algebra to first year students, did research on statistical aspects of extreme value theory and was involved with the supervision of a few masters’ students in their research at KSEPL (Shell, Rijswijk, The Netherlands). Moreover, on a grant by the VSB-fund (a bank) he could perform research at the University of North Carolina, USA, for 6 month (1993-1994). During that visit to the USA, he tried to connect the field of extreme value estimation with the field of kernel density estimation. In October 1999, already working for Statistics Netherlands for 3 years, he completed and successfully defended his PhD thesis “Estimating the extreme value index, tales of tails”. In 2003 he was one of the authors of a 40 page article in the Annals of Statistics, partly based on the results in his PhD-thesis. That article was joint work with prof. dr. P. Groeneboom and dr. R. Lopuhaä. Since May 1996 he is working at the research department of Statistics Netherlands. He performed research and did consultancy on several subjects: sample survey design, editing and imputation, lifetime of capital stock and disclosure control. The past four years he has specialised in the field of disclosure control. Jointly with two colleagues from Statistics Netherlands, he taught several international courses on that subject (as stand alone courses and as TES-courses) in e.g. Luxembourg, Ljubljana (Slovenia), Madison (Wisconsin, USA) and Sydney (Australia). He visited some countries as an expert on disclosure control to discuss and advise on the situation of the national statistical institutes concerning statistical disclosure control. He was involved with the development of the software packages µ- and t-argus on statistical disclosure control. To that end, he contributed to the fourth and fifth framework projects SDC and CASC, funded by EuroStat. He contributed to disclosure control methodology concerning both microdata and tabular data: he was involved with the development of PRAM and with the development of a heuristic to find secondary suppressions in hierarchical tables. He presented those methods on several international conferences and published about them in several proceedings. Currently, he is involved with the development of a remote access facility to microdata at Statistics Netherlands.

Istituto Nationale di Statistica

ISTAT will participate in the inventory, the further development of the ARGUS software, contribute to the handbook and organise the final conference in Rome.

Office for National Statistics

ONS will participate in the further development of the ARGUS software, contribute to the handbook.

Jane Longhurst.I am currently joint Head of the Statistical Disclosure Control (SDC) Centre of Expertise within the Methodology Directorate (MD) at the Office for National Statistics (ONS). I have responsibility for SDC work concerned with microdata, 2011 Census, Health Statistics and tabular data published on the Neighbourhood Statistics service. Managing these projects involves consulting with internal and external clients, overseeing technical work including research into new methodologies, contributing to the development of policy and strategies and reporting in writing and through presentations to different audiences from users, projects boards to academics. I am joint head of a centre of ten, have responsibility for business planning and resourcing and line manage three staff. I was Head of the Spatial Analysis and Modelling Branch (Implementation) branch of MD. My role involved managing a number of projects to implement spatial analysis and modelling techniques to produce statistics at the small area level for customers within the ONS and more widely across Government. I also managed projects to develop and enhance these established methodologies. I managed the data acquisition, preparation and mapping functions of the branch that support the analysis work. I actively promoted the work of the team and provided advice on small area estimation across the Government Statistical Service. I was responsible for the strategic planning of branch business and resources. I was in charge of a team of seven staff and had line management responsibility for four staff. I managed projects to develop and produce small area estimates of crime, income and health indicators using statistical modelling techniques that combine survey and administrative data sources. I was responsible for identifying appropriate data sources, statistical modelling and analysis, diagnostic testing, organising peer review and user consultation, preparation of technical reports and user guidance and publication. I liaised with internal and external customers and gave presentations to users, project boards and conferences. I had line management responsibility for two staff. I developed probability models for risk assessment and wrote and tested software to implement these methods. I used statistical models and time series analysis to forecast gas demand. I developed a questionnaire to measure the awareness of gas network control engineers, analysed the results of the test and documented the method and results. Studying part time for MSc in Official Statistics. Eleven out of sixteen modules completed passing first three years with distinction.

Statistisches Bundesamt

StBA will participate in the inventory, the further development of the ARGUS software and contribute to the handbook.

Sarah Giessing studied mathematics and statistics. After graduation (Diploma in mathematics, Philipps University Marburg, 1988) she joined the Statistisches Bundesamt, Department of Mathematical Statistical Methods. Since 1996 her main field of interest is tabular data protection. She has carried out a major research project on software packages for tabular data protection. In the EPROS project CASC, she was member of the steering committee, co-ordinating a workpackage concerned with tabular data protection. She was involved in the German national research project “Factual Anonymisation of Business Microdata”, and is going to co-ordinate work in a new task force on harmonization of tabular data protection in the German statistica system. She had several published papers on aspects of tabular data protection.

Rainer Lenz has a Ph.D in mathematics from University Kaiserslautern. He joined Destatis in January 2003. In the EPROS project he was responsible for the development of record-linkage software to be used for disclosure risk estimation of anonymized micro-data files. He was involved in the German national research project “Factual Anonymisation of Business Microdata” testing masking methods and methods suggested to estimate disclosure risk. He has been invited to prepare a contribution on Access to Business Microdata for Analysis for the 2005 Joint UNECE/Eurostat worksession on statistical confidentiality.

Jobst Heitzig earned a Ph.D in mathematics at University Hannover. He joined the Destatis IT department in October 2002. He works in the Destatis SAS expert team and is concerned with software aspects of Remote Access. He has been invited to prepare a contribution on software aspects of Remote Access for the 2005 Joint UNECE/Eurostat worksession on statistical confidentiality.

Universitat Rovira i Virgili

URV will participate in the inventory, contribute to the handbook and organise scientifically the final conference in Rome.

Josep Domingo-Ferrer (Sabadell, Catalonia, 1965) is a Full Professor of Computer Science at Rovira i Virgili University of Tarragona, where he currently leads the CRISES research group(http://vneumann.etse.urv.es). CRISES has been recognized by the Government of Catalonia as a reference research group in the fields of information privacy and security, including Statistical Disclosure Control (SDC). Since 1995, Prof. Domingo-Ferrer has been a member of the Catalan Council for Statistics, a consultative body to IDESCAT-Statistics Catalonia, where he advises on SDC. Between 2002 and 2005, Prof. Domingo-Ferrer served as a Dean of the School of Engineering at Rovira Virgili University, after having served as a Vice-Dean from 1999 to 2002.  He has been a Visiting Fellow at Princeton University,USA (2004),  a Visiting Scholar at the University of Wisconsin, USA (1990) and a “Praktikant” at the Corporate R+D Department of Siemens AG in Munich, Germany (1990). Later in 2005, he will be a Visiting Professor at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. In 1988, Prof. Domingo-Ferrer received with honors a M. Sc. in Computer Science from the Autonomous University of Barcelona (Outstanding Graduation Award). In 1991, he received with honors a Ph. D. in Computer Science also from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. In 1995, he received a M. Sc. in Mathematics from UNED, Madrid. Prof. Domingo-Ferrer's research interests span data protection in a broad sense, from cryptography to statistical database security, including privacy and smart cards.  He has co-authored two patents, one of them international and both of them being exploited. He has co-authored over 130 journal and conference publications and has advised 9 completed Ph. D. theses.  One of his articles on SDC, published in 2002 in the “IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering” journal,  reached in early 2005 the “Highly Cited Paper” category (among the top 1% cited papers in computer science according to the Institute for Scientific Information). In 2003, he received the Salvà i Campillo Prize to the Most Outstanding Research, awarded by the Catalan Association of Telecom Engineers (Barcelona). In 2004, he received the TOYPS'2004 prize awarded by the Junior Chambers of Catalonia in recognition of his academic and scientific career.  Prof. Domingo-Ferrer has led European, American, Spanish and Catalan research projects. He was the co-ordinator of the 5th FP project CO-ORTHOGONAL (IST-2001-32012); he has served in the five-people Steering Committee of the CASC project (“Computational Aspects of Statistical Confidentiality”, IST-2000-25069);  he was the co-ordinator  of the Spanish project STREAMOBILE (TIC2001-0633-C03) and he currently co-ordinates the PROPRIETAS project(“Protection of intellectual property and privacy”, SEG2004-04583-C04).  He has been awarded research contracts on Statistical Disclosure Control  by the U. S. Bureau of the Census (2000-01) and Cornell University (2004-05), both from the USA. Among other participations as a partner, he took part in the European project RESET (“Roadmaps for European Research on Smart Card Technologies”, IST-2001-37936).  He has been a Program Chairman of the following conferences: “Statistical Data Protection'98” (Lisbon, 1998), IFIP CARDIS'2000 (4th Smart Card Research and Advanced Application Conference, Bristol UK, 2000), “AMRADS Workshop on the Theory and Practice of SDC” (Luxemburg, 2001) and  “Privacy in Statistical Databases-PSD'2004” (Barcelona, 2004). He currently is a General Chairman of IFIP CARDIS'2006 (7th Smart Card Research and Advanced Application Conference, Tarragona, 2006) and MDAI'2006 (Models and Decisions for Artificial Intelligence, Tarragona, 2006). He has been an “Invited Discussant” in the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th  Joint EUROSTAT/UNECE Worksessions on Statistical Data Confidentiality (1999, 2001, 2003 and 2005, respectively). He has served in over 20 Program Committees of International Conferences, among which ”Eurocrypt’96”, ”CARDIS’96”, ”ISW’2000”, ”ISC’2003”, “ICICS'2004”, ”USENIX/IFIP CARDIS’2002”, “IFIP CARDIS'2004”, “PDM'2005-Privacy Data Management”, “ACISP'2005-Australasian Conference on Information Security and Privacy”, “TRUSTBUS'2005”, “Indocrypt'2005”, etc.  Since 2005 he is an Associate Editor of  the “Journal of Official Statistics” for SDC. He has been a Guest Editor of the following journals: ”Computer Networks”, ”Intl. Journal on Uncertainty, Fuzziness and Knowledge-Based Systems” and “Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery”. He chairs the IEEE Information Theory Spanish Chapter. He has reviewed papers for a great number of  refereed journals, including several IEEE Transactions and leading journals in management science. He has been a project evaluator and reviewer on data security for the European Commission, the Dutch Government, the Spanish R+D Plan and the Catalan Agency for Research and Universities.  He has been specially invited to give talks on privacy and SDC in such places as U.S. National Science Foundation (Washington DC, USA), Eurostat, U. S. Bureau of the Census (Washington DC, USA), European Comission Joint Research Center, Universität Tübingen (Germany), IBM Almaden Research Center (USA), Centre National pour la Recherche Scientifique (Paris, France), Université Catholique de Louvain (Belgium), Université Laval (Québec), Institut d'Estudis Catalans, etc. Prof. Domingo-Ferrer is a Senior Member  of 'IEEE-Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and a Secretary of  IFIP (Intl. Federation for Information Processing) WG 8.8 on smart cards. Josep Domingo-Ferrer homepage

Statistical Office of the Republic of Slovenia

SORS will participate as tester of the ARGUS software and assist in describing the future issues in SDC.

Statistics Sweden

SCB will participate as tester of the ARGUS software and assist in describing the future issues in SDC.

Statistical Office of Estonia

Estonia will participate as tester of the ARGUS software and assist in describing the future issues in SDC.

Statistic Austria

Austria will participate as tester of the ARGUS software and assist in describing the future issues in SDC.