Research Talk by COMSYS Almunus Dr. Erik Buchholz
We are pleased to announce that Dr. Erik Buchholz will be visiting COMSYS next week. As part of this visit, he will also hold a research talk titled “The Long Road to Trajectory Privacy – How far have we come?”.
When: Wednesday, July 15th 13:30-14:30Where: At COMSYS’ Big Meeting Room – Computer Science Department, Building E3, Room 9006Title: The Long Road to Trajectory Privacy – How far have we come?
Abstract Our movements disclose a wealth of sensitive information about us - from our secret habits to religious and political opinions. Yet, legitimate usage of trajectory data can benefit the entire society, as highlighted by contact tracing during the recent pandemic. Therefore, numerous approaches for protecting the privacy of trajectory data have been proposed. Even today’s de facto privacy standard, differential privacy (DP), has been applied to the trajectory domain. Still, recent works show that we are still far from our goal of releasing high-quality trajectories for arbitrary applications under strong guarantees.
This talk will provide a gentle introduction to the field of location trajectories and their privacy protection. We will begin the journey with the well-known notion of Geo-Indistinguishability for location privacy and discuss why protecting locations is not enough. After a brief overview of protection mechanisms, especially those providing DP, and their shortcomings, we look into a recent attack that uses deep learning to attack differential privacy. Finally, we explore the idea of generating synthetic yet realistic trajectories instead of adding protection to the real data. Could this be the solution?
Speaker Bio Dr. Erik Buchholz is a Research Scientist in the Cybersecurity and Quantum Systems group at CSIRO, working on privacy-enhancing technologies, differential privacy, and deep learning / AI. He completed his PhD at UNSW Sydney and CSIRO’s Data61 in 2025 on the privacy of location trajectories, with publications at PETS and ACSAC and a Best Paper Award at PST'24, and was recognized as one of Australia’s Top100 Future Leaders in 2025. He is an RWTH Alumnus, Bachelor and Master graduation in 2017 and 2020, respectively. He received the Vöcking Master Award 2020 for his thesis that was jointly supervised by COMSYS and IKV (as part of the EXC IoP).