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Welcome to Simson Garfinkel's personal web site.

Simson L. Garfinkel serves on the Association for Computing Machinery's U.S. Technology and Policy Committee, and on its Ethics and Plagiarism Committee. He is also a science journalist who has published hundreds of articles in newspapers and magazines, and 17 books. His research interests broadly include data science ethics, digital forensics, personal information management, counter-intelligence and counter-terrorism. (Read full bio.)

Recent Publications

• 2023-10-31 WHOOP's AI (LLM) Coach (LinkedIn).
• 2023-08-01 Simson Garfinkel, Jon Stewart, Sharpening Your Tools: Updating bulk_extractor for the 2020s, Communications of the ACM, August 2023
• 2023-01-01 Simson Garfinkel and Eugene H. Spafford. 2023. In Memoriam: Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. 1931-2022, Commun. ACM 65, 10 (Jan 2023), https://doi.org/10.1145/3572995
• 2022-01-24 Differential Privacy and the 2020 US Census published by the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing Case Studies series.
• 2021-10-22 AMS Notices has published The Philosophy of Differential Privacy, which I wrote with Claire McKay Bowen.
• 2021-04-13 I will be teaching GWU DATS 6450 — Data Science Ethics this fall.
• 2020-08-28 Marian S. Garfinkel (1932-2020)
• 2020-01-23 Simson's Notepaper App has been upgraded! Print your own notepaper! And new features are on the way, including integration with Apple Calendar.
• 2019-11-19 The Computer Book Talk at NSF

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Recent tutorials and presentations

Note: talks with the same name may (and frequently do) have different slides

• 2023-12-18 Differential Privacy Theory and Practice video
• 2020-06-15 Using Apache Spark and Differential Privacy for Protecting the Privacy of the 2020 Census Respondents, at the Spark+AI virtual conference.
• 2019-11-19 The Computer Book Talk at NSF
• 2019-07-16 PETS Keynote Address - Deploying Differential Privacy for the 2020 Census of Population and Housing (slides) (pdf)
• 2019-06-18 Mac Forensics in 90 Minutes
• 2019-05-02 Differential Privacy Concepts
• 2019-01-28 Rice Symposium on Data Privacy, discussing the 2020 Disclosure Avoidance System.

See also my Presentations Archive.

Recent publications

1. Garfinkel, Simson. Differential Privacy and the 2020 Census, MIT Schwarzman College of Computing Case Studies in Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing, Winter 2022.
2. Bowen, Claire McKay and Simson Garfinkel, The Philosophy of Differential Privacy, AMS Notices, November 2021.
3. Abowd, J. M., Ashmead, R., Cumings-Menon, R., Garfinkel, S., Kifer, D., Leclerc, P., Sexton, W., Simpson, A., Task, C., & Zhuravlev, P. (2021). An uncertainty principle is a price of privacy-preserving microdata. In M. Ranzato, A. Beygelzimer, Y. Dauphin, P. Liang, & J. W. Vaughan (Eds.), Advances in neural information processing systems (pp. 11883– 11895). Curran Associates, Inc. https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper/2021
4. Simson L. Garfinkel and Philip Leclerc. 2020. Randomness Concerns when Deploying Differential Privacy. In Proceedings of the 19th Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society (WPES'20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 73–86. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3411497.3420211 (Acceptance rate 44%)

Current projects Software and systems Cleaning up the Sleuth Kit Github site Pull Requests and outstanding Issues. _Differential Privacy_ (MIT Press 2025) Plant-Tracer, a computer vision application for plant movement labs. Teaching Co-Teaching Defense of the Dark Arts (Cybersecurity Edition) at Harvard. Co-Teaching AC221 Critical Thinking in Data Science at Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences Co-Teaching CSCI E-11, Frontiers in Computer Science at Harvard Extension Academic Research Article on https://digitalcorpora.org/ for a forensics journal. You may also be interested in my Future Projects Completed projects bulk_extractor 2.0 tcpflow 2.0 Law and Policy for the Quantum Age, Hoofnagle & Garfinkel, (Cambridge University Press, 2021) tcpflow, a TCP/IP session reassembler (2006--2014) bulk_extractor, a high-speed feature extractor (2006--2014) Digital Forensics XML (2005--2012) The Forensics Wiki, founder and maintainer (2005--2014) SBook5, a free-format address book for MacOS. (1991--2006) AFF, The Advanced Forensic Format (for storing digital evidence) Agenda, an early conference scheduling app for PalmOS. (2001) Print your own notepaper (2003, updated in 2020!) Updated MediaWiki BibText Extension (2007) NeXTWORLD Magazine (1991--1993) 10 Spring Street, Vineyard Haven, Virtual Tour (1995) docx_steg Tools for hiding information in docx files and printing their contents (2008) Resources For Students Current Toolset -- The tools that I use in my research Open Source Computer Science Books -- A good list Mac Resources LaTeX Resources Python Resources Web Resources Windows Resources XML Resources Student Resources SEED: Developing Instructional Laboratories for Computer Security Education Where to find Simson Garfinkel online @xchatty on Twitter @xchatty@newsie.social on Mastodon simsong on GitHub Articles in Technology Review ACM Digital Library Author Profile Or just click: Official ACM Publications DBLP Profile LinkedIn Profile Scopus StackExchange csauthors.net (Both my Erdös number and my Dijkstra numbers are three.) Google Scholar Muckrack Wikipedia Article on Simson Garfinkel Amazon.com Listmania! Lists ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1294-2831 Mendeley BibTeX: Garfinkel Academic CSO Magazine Boston Globe NeXTWORLD Technology Review Other