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From Simson Garfinkel
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
- Garfinkel, Simson. 2024. “Complete Delete: In Practice, Clicking ‘Delete’ Rarely Deletes. Should It?” MIT Case Studies in Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing, September. https://doi.org/10.21428/2c646de5.26e95ae4.
- Garfinkel, Simson. "Comment to Mulalidhar and Domingo-Ferrer (2023) – Legacy Statistical Disclosure Limitation Techniques Were Not An Option for the 2020 US Census of Population And Housing", Journal of Official Statistics, vol.39, no.3, 2023, pp.399-410. https://doi.org/10.2478/jos-2023-0018
- Abowd, J., Ashmead, R., Cumings-Menon, R., Garfinkel, S., Heineck, M., Heiss, C., Johns, R., Kifer, D., Leclerc, P., Machanavajjhala, A., Moran, B., Sexton, W., Spence, M., & Zhuravlev, P. (2022). The 2020 Census Disclosure Avoidance System TopDown Algorithm. Harvard Data Science Review, (Special Issue 2). https://doi.org/10.1162/99608f92.529e3cb9
- Larry Medsker, Philip Koopman, Homa Alemzadeh, Simson Garfinkel, Andrew Grosso, Carl Landwehr, Sam Liles, John Murray, Cristina Nita-Rotaru, William Widen, and Alec Yasinsac. 2024. ACM TechBrief: Automated Vehicles. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA.
- Garfinkel, S. How Technology Review got its start, Technology Review, January 4, 2024
- Garfinkel, Simson, Rvi Jain, and Aron Rosenthal, Comments in response to NITRD Request for Information for the Creation of a National Digital Twins R&D Strategy Plan, Association for Computing Machinery US Technology Policy Committee, July 18, 2024.
Recent tutorials and presentations
Note: talks with the same name may (and frequently do) have different slides
- 2024-09-20 Exploring the limits of Differential Privacy
- 2024-06-03 Driving Innovation from the University to Government and the Enterprise: Tricks, Traps and Techniques
- 2023-12-18 Differential Privacy Theory and Practice video
See also my Presentations Archive.
Recent Notable publications
Academic:
- Clark, David. D, Simson Garfinkel, and KC Claffy, Differential Privacy, Firm-Level Data, and the Binomial Pathology, IEEE Security and Privacy, January 2025.
- Garfinkel, Simson. 2024. “Complete Delete: In Practice, Clicking ‘Delete’ Rarely Deletes. Should It?” MIT Case Studies in Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing, September. https://doi.org/10.21428/2c646de5.26e95ae4.
- Garfinkel, Simson. "Comment to Mulalidhar and Domingo-Ferrer (2023) – Legacy Statistical Disclosure Limitation Techniques Were Not An Option for the 2020 US Census of Population And Housing", Journal of Official Statistics, vol.39, no.3, 2023, pp.399-410. https://doi.org/10.2478/jos-2023-0018
- Garfinkel, Simson. Differential Privacy and the 2020 Census, MIT Schwarzman College of Computing Case Studies in Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing, Winter 2022.
- Bowen, Claire McKay and Simson Garfinkel, The Philosophy of Differential Privacy, AMS Notices, November 2021.
History of Computing, Technology and MIT:
- Garfinkel, S. “M.I.T., rah, rah, rah. Technology!”, April 22, 2025
- Garfinkel, S. MIT prepares for nuclear attack, February 25, 2025
- Garfinkel, S. MIT’s (mostly) secret society, December 23, 2024
- Garfinkel, S. This is MIT and yes, we have bananas, August 27, 2024
- Garfinkel, S. Editor of The Tech becomes president of MIT, Technology Review, June 25, 2024
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