Title: How Will Statistical Agencies Operate When All Data are Private?
Speaker: John Abowd, 2016 Recipient of Julius Shiskin Memorial Award for Economic Statistics
Chair: Robert Parker, Chair, Shiskin Award Selection Committee
Time: Tuesday, September 6, 2016, 1 – 3 pm
Where: Auditorium, U.S. Census Bureau, 4600 Silver Hill Road, Suitland, Maryland

Abstract: The dual problems of respecting citizen privacy and protecting the confidentiality of their data—Ken Prewitt’s famous “don’t ask/don’t tell” dictum—have become hopelessly conflated in the “Big Data” era. There are orders of magnitude more data outside an agency’s firewall than inside it—compromising the integrity of traditional statistical disclosure limitation methods. And increasingly the information processed by the agency was “asked” in a context wholly outside the agency’s operations—blurring the distinction between what was asked and what is published. Already private businesses like Microsoft, Google and Apple recognize that cybersecurity (safeguarding the integrity and access controls for internal data) and privacy protection (ensuring that what is published does not reveal too much about any person or business) are two sides of the same coin. This is a paradigm-shifting moment for statistical agencies. This talk will examine how statistical agencies can respond in manner consistent with their missions.

Speaker biography: John M. Abowd, is Edmund Ezra Day Professor of Economics, professor of information science, and professor of statistics at Cornell University, and since June, 2016 the Associate Director for Research and Methodology and Chief Scientist at the Census Bureau. He began teaching and conducting research at Cornell in 1987 where he established, along with his colleague Lars Vilhuber, and directed the Cornell Virtual Research Data Center, and the Labor Dynamics Institute, while also directing the Cornell Institute for Social and Economic Research. He is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and at several research organizations in France and Germany, as well as with the French national statistical office. He is a fellow of the Society of Labor Economists, the ASA, and the Econometric Society, as well as an elected member of the International Statistical Institute. He has served on the National Research Council’s Committee on National Statistics, the American Economic Association’s Committee on Economic Statistics.

The Shiskin Award is given in recognition of unusually original and important contributions in the development of economic statistics, or in the use of statistics in interpreting the economy.The Shiskin award was established in 1980 and is cosponsored by the Washington Statistical Society, the National Association for Business Economics, and the Business and Economics Statistics Section of the American Statistical Association. Past recipients include former Census Bureau Director, Robert Groves, and former Deputy Director, Thomas Mesenbourg.