Dr. Christine Task

Dr. Task’s work spans two domains at Knexus: Privacy Technology, and AI Algorithms. Regarding privacy, she researches and develops usable privacy technology solutions to real-world data privacy problems. Her work focuses on privatization processing for data sets containing sensitive personal data, which enables aggregate information to be shared for others to analyze, while provably protecting the privacy of individuals.
Her research in Algorithms and Artificial Intelligence centers on algorithmic efficiency improvements for problems in AI diagnosis and planning domains. Current interests include developing efficient techniques for sampling high-quality solutions to problems with diverse solution spaces and reducing provably unnecessary complexity in search spaces.

Dr. Task’s work in privacy has focused on privacy-preserving data mining and social network analysis. She has published her research in the SIAM Journal of Scientific Computing and at SDM and ASONAM conferences.

Her 2012 CERIAS seminar lecture, “A Practical Beginner’s Guide to Differential Privacy,” has been viewed online more than 2,000 times, used in graduate and undergraduate courses across the globe, and cited on the Google Security research blog.

Her favorite NP-complete problem is the 3-coloring problem, although she admits that’s cliche. She prefers Las Vegas algorithms to Monte Carlo algorithms (but understands the need for both). Her favorite poets are Edward Arlington Robinson and Amy Lowell, and her favorite out-of-print Victorian comedic genius is Marietta Holley.