Social networking has taken off at an unexpected speed and now governs the Web. Typically, users do no longer rely only on search engines to navigate but do so through notification received on their Facebook wall, the RSS feeds they have subscribed to or their Twitter's followers. This generates a huge amount of information, most of it generated by users themselves, that usually results in a data overload. Filtering out the right information from noise requires to leverage personal data to personalize the process, Yet, users are more and more reluctant to give away their personal data to big brother kind of companies. In this talk, I will present a way to personalize the Web experience without sacrificing privacy to huge stackholders, relying on fully decentralized solutions, that do not require users to reveal their exact profiles and their exact tastes to the rest of the world.

Biography

Anne-Marie Kermarrec is a research director at INRIA Rennes since 2004 and chief scientist of the project team ASAP (As Scalable As Possible) on the foundations of dynamic large scale systems. She conducts her work in the field of distributed systems of peer to peer, social networks and epidemic algorithms. She is the principal investigator of the ERC Starting Grant project Gossple and the chair of the ACM Software System Award Committee. In 2011, she received the Montpetit award from the French academy of Science. Before joining INRIA she was a researcher since 2000 at Microsoft Research, Cambridge (United Kingdom). She received her Ph.D. in 1996 from the University of Rennes in the field of fault tolerance in distributed memories. In 2002 she obtained the accreditation to supervise research in the field of broadcasted applications. She also conducted a post-doctorate in 1997 at Vrije University where she worked with Maarten van Steen and Andrew. S. Tanenbaum.