Photo of Daniel Kifer

Daniel Kifer

Professor

Affiliation(s):

  • School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
  • Computer Science and Engineering
  • Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences

W333 Westgate Building

duk17@psu.edu

814-863-1187

Research Areas:

Data Science and Artificial Intelligence

 
 

 

Education

  • BA, Computer Science & Mathematics, New York University, 2000
  • MS, Computer Science, Cornell University, 2004
  • Ph D, Computer Science, Cornell University, 2006

Publications

Books

  • Bee-Chung Chen, Daniel Kifer, Kristen LeFevre and Ashwin Machanavajjhala, 2009, Privacy-Preserving Data Publishing, NOW Publishers, pp. 1–167
  • Daniel Kifer, 2009, Encyclopedia of Database Systems, Springer US

Journal Articles

  • Zeyu Ding, Yuxin Wang, Yingtai Xiao, Guanhong Wang , Danfeng Zhang and Daniel Kifer, 2023, "Free gap estimates from the exponential mechanism, sparse vector, noisy max and related algorithms.", Journal of the VLDB
  • Prabhav Borate, Jacques Rivière, Chris Marone, Ankur Mali, Daniel Kifer and Parisa Shokouhi, 2023, "Using a physics-informed neural network and fault zone acoustic monitoring to predict lab earthquakes", Nature communications
  • Chaopeng Shen, Alison Appling, Pierre Gentine, Toshiyuki Bandai, Hoshin Gupta, Alexandre Tartakovsky, Marco Baity-Jesi, Fabrizio Fenicia, Daniel Kifer, Li Li, Xiaofeng Liu, Wei Ren, Yi Zheng, Ciaran Harman, Martyn Clark, Matthew Farthing, Dapeng Fang, Praveen Kumar, Doaa Aboelyazeed, Farshid Rahmani, Yalan Song, Hylke Beck, Tadd Bindas, Dipankar Dwivedi, Kaui Fang, Marvin Höge, Chris Rackauckas, Binayak Mohanty, Tirthankar Roy, Chonggang Xu and Kathryn Lawson, 2023, "Differentiable modelling to unify machine learning and physical models for geosciences", Nature Reviews Earth & Environment
  • Kuai Fang, Daniel Kifer, Kathryn Lawson, Dapeng Feng and Chaopeng Shen, 2022, "The data synergy effects of time-series deep learning models in hydrology.", Water Resources Research, 58, (4)
  • Alexander Ororbia and Daniel Kifer, 2022, "The neural coding framework for learning generative models.", Nature Communications, 13, (1)
  • Savinay Nagendra, Daniel Kifer, Benjamin Mirus, Te Pei, Kathryn Lawson, Srikanth Banagere Manjunatha, Weixin Li, Hien Nguyen, Tong Qiu, Sarah Tran and Chaopeng Shen, 2022, "Constructing a large-scale landslide database across heterogeneous environments using task-specific model updates", IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing, 15
  • Parisa Shokouhi, Vikas Kumar, Sumedha Prathipati, Seyyed Hosseini, Clyde Lee Giles and Daniel Kifer, 2021, "Physics-informed deep learning for prediction of CO2 storage site response", Journal of Contaminant Hydrology, 241
  • Parisa Shokouhi, Vrushali Girkar, Srisharan Shreedharan, Chris Malone, Clyde Lee Giles and Daniel Kifer, 2021, "Deep Learning Can Predict Laboratory Quakes From Active Source Seismic Data", Geophysical Research Letters
  • Alex Ororbia, Ankur Mali, Clyde L Giles and Daniel Kifer, 2020, "Continual Learning of Recurrent Neural Networks by Locally Aligning Distributed Representations", IEEE Trans. Neural Networks Learn. Syst
  • Kuai , Daniel Kifer, Kathryn Lawson and Chaopeng Shen, 2020, "Evaluating the Potential and Challenges of an Uncertainty Quantification Method for Long Short-Term Memory Models for Soil Moisture Predictions", Water Resources Research
  • Yue Wang, Daniel Kifer and Jaewoo Lee, 2019, "Differentially Private Confidence Intervals for Empirical Risk Minimization", Journal of Privacy and Confidentiality, 9, (1)
  • Corina Graif, Brittany Freelin, Yu-Hsuan Kuo, Hongjian Wang, Zhenhui Li and Daniel Kifer, 2019, "Network Spillovers and Neighborhood Crime: A computational statistics analysis of employment-based networks of neighborhoods", Justice Quarterly
  • Hongjian Wang, Xianfeng Tang, Yu-Hsuan Kuo, Daniel Kifer and Zhenhui Li, 2019, "A Simple Baseline for Travel Time Estimation using Large-scale Trip Data", ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology, 10, (2)
  • Chaopeng Shen, Eric Laloy, Amin Elshorbagy, Adrian Albert, Jerad Bales, Fi-John Chang, Sangram Ganguly, Kuo-Lin Hsu, Daniel Kifer, Zheng Fang, Kuai Fang, Dongfeng Li, Xiaodong Li and Wen-Ping Tsai, 2018, "HESS Opinions: Incubating Deep-learning-powered Hydrologic Science Advances as a Community", Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, 22, (11), pp. 5639-5656
  • Yue Wang, Daniel Kifer, Jaewoo Lee and Vishesh Karwa, 2018, "Statistical Approximating Distributions Under Differential Privacy", Journal of Privacy and Confidentiality
  • Kuai Fang, Chaopeng Shen, Daniel Kifer and Xiao Yang, 2017, "Prolongation of SMAP to Spatiotemporally Seamless Coverage of Continental U.S. Using a Deep Learning Neural Network", Geophysical Research Letters
  • Alexander G. Ororbia II, Daniel Kifer and C. Lee Giles, 2017, "Unifying Adversarial Training Algorithms with Data Gradient Regularization", Neural Computation
  • Hongjian Wang, Daniel Kifer, Corina Graif and Zhenhui Li, 2017, "Non-Stationary Model for Crime Rate Inference Using Modern Urban Data", IEEE Transactions on Big Data
  • A. G. Ororbia II, C. L. Giles and Daniel Kifer, 2016, "Unifying Adversarial Training Algorithms with Flexible Deep Data Gradient Regularization", CoRR
  • Bing-Rong Lin and Daniel Kifer, 2015, "Information Measures in Statistical Privacy and Data Processing Applications", ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data, 9, (4), pp. 28
  • Ashwin Machanavajjhala and Daniel Kifer, 2015, "Designing Statistical Privacy for Your Data", Communications of the ACM, 58, (3), pp. 58–67
  • Yue Wang, Jaewoo Lee and Daniel Kifer, 2015, "Differentially Private Hypothesis Testing, Revisited", CoRR, abs/1511.03376
  • Bing-Rong Lin and Daniel Kifer, 2014, "On Arbitrage-free Pricing for General Data Queries", PVLDB, 7, (9), pp. 757–768
  • Daniel Kifer and Ashwin Machanavajjhala, 2014, "Pufferfish: A Framework for Mathematical Privacy Definitions", ACM Transations on Database Systems, 39, (1), pp. 3
  • Bing-Ron Lin and Daniel Kifer, 2014, "Towards a Systematic Analysis of Privacy Definitions", Journal of Privacy and Confidentiality, 5, (2), pp. 57-109
  • Bing-Rong Lin and Daniel Kifer, 2012, "A Framework for Extracting Semantic Guarantees from Privacy", CoRR, abs/1208.5443
  • Daniel Kifer and B.-R. Lin, 2010, "Towards and Axiomatization of Statistical Privacy and Utility"
  • Ashwin Machanavajjhala, Daniel Kifer, Johannes Gehrke and Muthuramakrishnan Venkitasubramaniam, 2007, "L-diversity: Privacy beyond k-anonymity", TKDD, 1, (1)
  • David J. Martin, Daniel Kifer, Ashwin Machanavajjhala, Johannes Gehrke and Joseph Y. Halpern, 2007, "Worst-Case Background Knowledge for Privacy-Preserving Data Publishing", CoRR, abs/0705.2787
  • Manuel Calimlim, Jim Cordes, Alan J. Demers, Julia Deneva, Johannes Gehrke, Daniel Kifer, Mirek Riedewald and Jayavel Shanmugasundaram, 2004, "A Vision for PetaByte Data Management and Analyis Services for theArecibo Telescope", IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin, 27, (4), pp. 12–20
  • Manuel Calimlim, Jim Cordes, Alan J. Demers, Julia Deneva, Johannes Gehrke, Daniel Kifer, Mirek Riedewald and Jayavel Shanmugasundaram, 2004, "A Vision for PetaByte Data Management and Analyis Services for the Arecibo Telescope", IEEE Data Eng. Bull., 27, (4), pp. 12–20
  • Cristian Bucila, Johannes Gehrke, Daniel Kifer and Walker M. White, 2003, "DualMiner: A Dual-Pruning Algorithm for Itemsets with Constraints", Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, 7, (3), pp. 241–272

Conference Proceedings

  • Yingtai Xiao, Guanlin He, Danfeng Zhang and Daniel Kifer, 2023, "An Optimal and Scalable Matrix Mechanism for Noisy Marginals under Convex Loss Functions"
  • Ankur Arjun Mali, Alexander G Ororbia, Daniel Kifer and Clyde L Giles, 2022, ". Neural JPEG: end-to-end image compression leveraging a standard JPEG encoder-decoder", Digital Compression Conference (DCC)
  • Jaewoo Lee and Daniel Kifer, 2021, "Scaling up Differentially Private Deep Learning with Fast Per-Example Gradient Clipping"
  • Ankur Mali, Alex Ororbia, Daniel Kifer and Clyde L Giles, 2021, "Recognizing and Verifying Mathematical Equations Using Multiplicative Differential Neural Units"
  • Ankur Mali, Alex Ororbia, Daniel Kifer and Clyde L Giles, 2021, "An Empirical Analysis of Recurrent Learning Algorithms in Neural Lossy Image Compression Systems"
  • Yingtai Xiao, Zeyu Ding, Yuxin Wang, Danfeng Zhang and Daniel Kifer, 2021, "Optimizing Fitness-For-Use of Differentially Private Linear Queries"
  • Yuxin Wang, Zeyu Ding, Yingtai Xiao, Daniel Kifer and Danfeng Zhang, 2021, "DPGen: Automated Program Synthesis for Differential Privacy"
  • Daniel Kifer, 2021, "OmniLayout: Room Layout Reconstruction From Indoor Spherical Panoramas."
  • Ankur Arjun Mali, Alex Ororbia, Daniel Kifer and Clyde Lee Giles, 2021, "Recognizing Long Grammatical Sequences using Recurrent Networks Augmented with an External Differentiable Stack"
  • Ankur Arjun Mali, Alex Ororbia, Daniel Kifer and Clyde Lee Giles, 2021, "Investigating Backpropagation Alternatives when Learning to Dynamically Count with Recurrent Neural Networks"
  • John Abowd, Robert Ashmead, Ryan Cumings-Menon, Simson Garfinkel, Daniel Kifer, Philip Leclerc, William Sexton, Ashley Simpson, Christine Task and Pavel Zhuravlev, 2021, "An Uncertainty Principle is a Price of Privacy-Preserving Microdata"
  • Zeyu Ding, Yuxin Wang, Danfeng Zhang and Daniel Kifer, 2020, "Free Gap Information from the Differentially Private Sparse Vector and Noisy Max Mechanisms"
  • Yuxin Wang, Zeyu Ding, Daniel Kifer and Danfeng Zhang, 2020, "CheckDP: An Automated and Integrated Approach for Proving Differential Privacy or Finding Precise Counterexamples"
  • Ke Yuan, Dafang He, Xiao Yang, Zhi Tang, Daniel Kifer and Clyde L Giles, 2020, "Follow The Curve: Arbitrarily Oriented Scene Text Detection Using Key Points Spotting And Curve Prediction."
  • Anand Gopalakrishnan, Ankur Mali, Daniel Kifer, Lee Giles and Alexander Ororbia, 2019, "A Neural Temporal Model for Human Motion Prediction"
  • Yuxin Wang, Zeyu Ding, Guanhong Wang, Daniel Kifer and Danfeng Zhang, 2019, "Proving Differential Privacy with Shadow Execution"
  • Xiao Yang, Madian Khabsa, Miaosen Wang, Wei Wang, Ahmed Hassan Awadallah, Daniel Kifer and Lee Giles, 2019, "Adversarial Training for Community Question Answer Selection Based on Multi-scale Matching"
  • Dafang He, Xiao Yang, Daniel Kifer and C. Lee Giles, 2019, "TextContourNet: a Flexible and Effective Framework for Improving Scene Text Detection Architecture with a Multi-task Cascade"
  • Chen Chen, Jaewoo Lee and Daniel Kifer, 2019, "Renyi Differentially Private ERM for Smooth Objectives", pp. 2037-2046
  • Songshan Yang, Jiawei Wen, Xiang Zhan and Daniel Kifer, 2019, "ET-Lasso: A New Efficient Tuning of Lasso for High-Dimensional Data"
  • Jaewoo Lee and Daniel Kifer, 2018, "Concentrated Differentially Private Gradient Descent with Adaptive per-Iteration Privacy Budget", pp. 1656-1665
  • Yu-Hsuan Kuo, Zhenhui Li and Daniel Kifer, 2018, "Detecting Outliers in Data with Correlated Measures", pp. 287-296
  • Yu-Hsuan Kuo, Cho-Chun Chiu, Daniel Kifer, Michael Hay and Ashwin Machanavajjhala, 2018, "Differentially Private Hierarchical Count-of-Counts Histograms", 11, (11), pp. 1509-1521
  • Zeyu Ding, Yuxin Wang, Guanhong Wang, Danfeng Zhang and Daniel Kifer, 2018, "Detecting Violations of Differential Privacy", ACM, pp. 475-489
  • Omar Montasser and Daniel Kifer, 2017, "Predicting Demographics of High-Resolution Geographies with Geotagged Tweets"
  • Ryan Rogers and Daniel Kifer, 2017, "A New Class of Private Chi-Square Hypothesis Tests", pp. 991-1000
  • H. Dafang, X. Yang, Z. Zhou, C. Liang, Alexander G. Ororbia II, Daniel Kifer, and C. Lee Giles, 2017, "Multi-scale FCN with Cascaded Instance Aware Segmentation for Arbitrary Oriented Word Spotting in the Wild"
  • Xiao Yang, Ersin Yumer, Paul Asente, Mike Kraley, Daniel Kifer and C. Lee Giles, 2017, "Learning to Extract Semantic Structure from Documents Using Multimodal Fully Convolutional Neural Networks"
  • Xiao Yang, Dafang He, Zihan Zhou, Daniel Kifer and C. Lee Giles, 2017, "Improving Offline Handwritten Chinese Character Recognition by Iterative Refinement"
  • Dafang He, Scott Cohen, Brian L. Price, Daniel Kifer and C. Lee Giles, 2017, "Multi-Scale MultiTask FCN for Semantic Page Segmentation and Table Detection"
  • Xiao Yang, Dafang He, Zihan Zhou, Daniel Kifer and C. Lee Giles, 2017, "Learning to Read Irregular Text with Attention Mechanisms"
  • Xiao Yang, Dafang He, Wenyi Huang, Alexander Ororbia, Zihan Zhou, Daniel Kifer and C. Lee Giles, 2017, "Smart Library: Identifying Books on Library Shelves Using Supervised Deep Learning for Scene Text Reading"
  • Danfeng Zhang and Daniel Kifer, 2017, "LightDP: Towards Automating Differential Privacy Proofs"
  • H. Wang, Y. H. Kuo, Daniel Kifer and Z. Li, 2016, "A Simple Baseline for Travel Time Estimation Using Large-scale Trip Data", ACM
  • W. Huang, D. He, X. Yang, Z. Zhou, Daniel Kifer and C. L. Giles, 2016, "Detecting Arbitrary Oriented Text in the Wild with a Visual Attention Model", ACM, pp. 551-555
  • H. Wang, Daniel Kifer, C. Graif and Z. Li, 2016, "Crime Rate Inference with Big Data", ACM, 13, pp. 635-644
  • Jaewoo Lee, Yue Wang and Daniel Kifer, 2015, "Maximum Likelihood Postprocessing for Differential Privacy under Consistency Constraints", pp. 635–644
  • Daniel Kifer, 2015, "On Estimating the Swapping Rate for Categorical Data", pp. 557–566
  • Daniel Kifer, 2015, "Privacy and the Price of Data", pp. 16
  • Bing-Rong Lin and Daniel Kifer, 2013, "Geometry of privacy and utility", pp. 281–284
  • Sirinda Palahan, Domagoj Babic, Swarat Chaudhuri and Daniel Kifer, 2013, "Extraction of statistically significant malware behaviors", pp. 69–78
  • Bing-Rong Lin and Daniel Kifer, 2013, "Information Preservation in Statistical Privacy and Bayesian Estimationof Unattributed Histograms", SIGMOD, New York, NY, pp. 677–688
  • Daniel Kifer and B.-R. Lin, 2012, "Analyzing Privacy and Utility Using Axioms", Proceedings of the Forty-Sixth Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems and Computers
  • Daniel Kifer, 2012, "COLT 2012 - The 25th Annual Conference on Learning Theory", JMLR.org, 23
  • Daniel Kifer, Adam D Smith and Abhradeep Thakurta, 2012, "Private Convex Optimization for Empirical Risk Minimization with Applicationsto High-dimensional Regression", pp. 25.1–25.40
  • Daniel Kifer and Ashwin Machanavajjhala, 2012, "A rigorous and customizable framework for privacy", pp. 77–88
  • , 2012, "Proceedings of the 31st ACM SIGMOD-SIGACT-SIGART Symposium on Principles of Database Systems, PODS 2012, Scottsdale, AZ, USA, May 20-24, 2012", ACM
  • Bing-Rong Lin and Daniel Kifer, 2012, "Reasoning about privacy using axioms", pp. 975–979
  • , 2012, "Conference Record of the Forty Sixth Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems and Computers, ACSCC 2012, Pacific Grove, CA, USA, November 4-7, 2012", IEEE
  • Daniel Kifer, Adam D Smith and Abhradeep Thakurta, 2012, "Private Convex Optimization for Empirical Risk Minimization with Applications to High-dimensional Regression", pp. 25.1–25.40
  • Daniel Kifer and Ashwin Machanavajjhala, 2011, "No free lunch in data privacy", pp. 193–204
  • Qi He, Daniel Kifer, Jian Pei, Prasenjit Mitra and Clyde L Giles, 2011, "Citation recommendation without author supervision", pp. 755–764
  • Bi Chen, Leilei Zhu, Daniel Kifer and Dongwon Lee, 2010, "What Is an Opinion About? Exploring Political Standpoints Using OpinionScoring Model"
  • Daniel Kifer and Bing-Rong Lin, 2010, "Towards an axiomatization of statistical privacy and utility", pp. 147–158
  • Qi He, Jian Pei, Daniel Kifer, Prasenjit Mitra and Clyde L Giles, 2010, "Context-aware citation recommendation", pp. 421–430
  • Johannes Gehrke, Daniel Kifer and Ashwin Machanavajjhala, 2010, "Privacy in data publishing", pp. 1213
  • Bi Chen, Leilei Zhu, Daniel Kifer and Dongwon Lee, 2010, "What Is an Opinion About? Exploring Political Standpoints Using Opinion Scoring Model"
  • Daniel Kifer, 2009, "Attacks on privacy and deFinetti’s theorem", pp. 127–138
  • , 2009, "Proceedings of the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, SIGMOD 2009, Providence, Rhode Island, USA, June 29 - July 2, 2009", ACM
  • Parag Agrawal, Daniel Kifer and Christopher Olston, 2008, "Scheduling shared scans of large data files", 1, (1), pp. 958–969
  • Ashwin Machanavajjhala, Daniel Kifer, John M. Abowd, Johannes Gehrke and Lars Vilhuber, 2008, "Privacy: Theory meets Practice on the Map", pp. 277–286
  • , 2008, "Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Data Engineering, ICDE 2008, April 7-12, 2008, Cancún, México", IEEE
  • David J. Martin, Daniel Kifer, Ashwin Machanavajjhala, Johannes Gehrke and Joseph Y. Halpern, 2007, "Worst-Case Background Knowledge for Privacy-Preserving Data Publishing", pp. 126–135
  • , 2007, "Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Data Engineering, ICDE 2007, The Marmara Hotel, Istanbul, Turkey, April 15-20, 2007", IEEE
  • Daniel Kifer and Johannes Gehrke, 2006, "Injecting utility into anonymized datasets", pp. 217–228
  • Ashwin Machanavajjhala, Johannes Gehrke, Daniel Kifer and Muthuramakrishnan Venkitasubramaniam, 2006, "l-Diversity: Privacy Beyond k-Anonymity", pp. 24
  • , 2006, "Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Data Engineering, ICDE 2006, 3-8 April 2006, Atlanta, GA, USA", IEEE Computer Society
  • Daniel Kifer, Shai Ben-David and Johannes Gehrke, 2004, "Detecting Change in Data Streams", pp. 180–191
  • Daniel Kifer, Johannes Gehrke, Cristian Bucila and Walker M. White, 2003, "How to quickly find a witness", pp. 272–283
  • Cristian Bucila, Johannes Gehrke, Daniel Kifer and Walker M. White, 2002, "DualMiner: a dual-pruning algorithm for itemsets with constraints", pp. 42–51
  • Yingtai Xaio, Guanhong Wang, Danfeng Zhang and Daniel Kifer, , "Answering Private Linear Queries Adaptively using the Common Mechanism", Proceedings of the VLDB
  • Alexander G Ororbia, Ankur Mali, Daniel Kifer and Clyde L Giles, , "Backpropagation-Free Deep Learning with Recursive Local Representation Alignment", AAAI

Manuscripts

  • Daniel Kifer and B.-R. Lin, , "An Axiomatic View of Statistical Privacy and Utility", Journal of Privacy and Confidentiality

Research Projects

Honors and Awards

Service

Service to Penn State:

Service to External Organizations:

 


 

About

The School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science was created in the spring of 2015 to allow greater access to courses offered by both departments for undergraduate and graduate students in exciting collaborative research fields.

We offer B.S. degrees in electrical engineering, computer science, computer engineering and data science and graduate degrees (master's degrees and Ph.D.'s) in electrical engineering and computer science and engineering. EECS focuses on the convergence of technologies and disciplines to meet today’s industrial demands.

School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

The Pennsylvania State University

207 Electrical Engineering West

University Park, PA 16802

814-863-6740

Department of Computer Science and Engineering

814-865-9505

Department of Electrical Engineering

814-865-7667