Talk: Camilla Hollanti (November 10, 2025 at 2:00 PM, Seminar room N2409)
Talks |
The Invisible Inquiry: How Codes Keep Your Data Searches Private
Camilla Hollanti
Abstract:
Private information retrieval (PIR) addresses the question of how to retrieve data items from a database or cloud without disclosing information about the identity of the data items retrieved. The area has received renewed attention in the context of PIR from coded storage, i.e., when files are stored with more complex redundancy than mere replication. Alongside with the basic principles of PIR, we will introduce the so-called star product PIR scheme and discuss the utility of star products of codes also more generally.
Biography:
Camilla Hollanti received the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Turku, Finland, in 2003 and 2009, respectively, both in mathematics. Since 2011, she has been with the Department of Mathematics and Systems Analysis, Aalto University, Finland, where she currently works as full professor and leads a research group in Algebra, Number Theory, and Applications. From 2017 to 2020, she was affiliated with the Institute of Advanced Studies, Technical University of Munich, where she held a Hans Fischer Fellowship. In 2020, Hollanti was awarded the honorary title of TUM Ambassador. Her current research interests lie within applications of algebraic number theory to security as well as in combinatorial and coding theoretic methods related to secure and private computation.
Dr. Hollanti is a coauthor of over 130 scientific peer-reviewed publications and is a recipient of several grants, including seven grants from the Research Council of Finland. In 2014, she received the World Cultural Council Special Recognition Award for young researchers. In 2017, the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters awarded her the Väisälä Prize in Mathematics. In 2024, Hollanti was elected a life-time member of the Finnish Academy of Sciences and Letters.
Since 2020, she has been serving as a member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Information Theory Society, and she was a general chair of the IEEE ISIT 2022. Hollanti was an editor of the AIMS Journal on Advances in Mathematics of Communications for 2014-2022 and an associate editor of IEEE Transactions of Information Theory for 2020-2023. Currently, she is an editor of the SIAM Journal of Applied Algebra and Geometry and Annales Fennici Mathematici.