UW expertise helps land a $1.6 million grant for Wisconsin

A system built by the UW–Madison Division of Information Technology (DoIT) played a key role in winning $1.6 million in federal research funding for Wisconsin health agencies.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) recently awarded a three-year Goal Oriented Privacy Preservation grant that promotes research on data mining strategies that preserve privacy. The Division of Public Health in Wisconsin’s Department of Health and Family Services and the Public Health Information Network (PHIN) system built by DoIT will partner with UW–Madison’s computer sciences department to serve as the test bed for researching these strategies.

This is an important first step toward a long-range goal of the PHIN, which aims to attract more researchers and to ultimately improve public health information. And UW–Madison scientists will be investigating and solving some very complex data problems that confront those working with public health information.

Federal regulations that control the release of detailed “microdata” to researchers now restrict access to many important datasets and databases. As a consequence, basic research in fields dependent on such datasets is increasingly being impeded.

A primary focus of this project is to “unlock” such critical datasets by developing automated techniques and tools that are capable of making anonymous a very large database containing tens of millions of records. Such tools will facilitate the release of datasets to researchers, while ensuring that the privacy of individuals in those datasets is maintained.

Results from the project will make it much easier for researchers at UW–Madison and around the country to obtain the data they need, without compromising individual privacy.