Outsourcing of data mining to an outside service provider brings important benefits to the data owner. These include (i) relief from the high mining cost, (ii) minimization of demands in resources, and (iii) effective centralized mining for multiple distributed owners. However, security and integrity are issues that must be tackled before enterprises can indeed outsource data mining task. The service provider should be prevented from accessing the actual data (security), and the results returned to the owner must be authentic (integrity).

In this talk, we will present the result of a secure association rules mining algorithm that we published recently to explain the outsourcing model and to illustrate the feasibility of an approach we used. In protecting the security in mining association rules, a substitution cipher technique has been proposed in the encryption of transactional data. After identifying the non-trivial threats to a straightforward one-to-one item mapping substitution cipher, we propose a novel secure encryption algorithm based on a one-to-n item mapping that transforms transactions non-deterministically, yet guarantees correct decryption. We will also discuss the integrity problem in the same outsourcing model for association mining.

Biography

Professor David Wai-lok Cheung (?????) is Head of Department of Computer Science and Director of the Center for E-commerce Infrastructure Development (CECID) in The University of Hong Kong. He is an active researcher in database, data mining and e-commerce technologies. His recent research covers security and integrity in outsourcing of data mining, data interoperability theory and xml schema transformation, projected clustering, sequential OLAP, and semantic query and searching.

He has published over 100 technical papers, many appeared on leading venues such as SIGMOD, VLDB, ICDE and KDD conferences and ACM TODS, ACM TKDD and IEEE TKDE journals. He was the recipient of the HKU Outstanding Researcher Award. He was the program chairman of the 2001 and 2005 Pacific-Asia Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Conferences, the conference chairman of the 2007 PAKDD Conference. He was the Program Vice Chair of ICDM 2006 and Program Chair of HKICC 2003.

Inapplied research, under the directorship of Professor Cheung, CECID has received prestigious grants from the Hong Kong SAR Government in a total amout of HK$40M. He and his team has developed open-source ebXML gateway used by developers from more than 80+ countries. The open-source product has received the prominent awards at the Hong Kong 2004 IT Excellence Awards competition, the 2004 Asia-Pacific ICT Awards competition, and the 2005 Linux Business Awards competition.