Today, Facebook announced a new research award opportunity in privacy-preserving technology at the Association for Computing Machinery Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) attendees’ evening banquet. Taking place in London from November 11 to 15, CCS brings together security experts from all over the world to explore new ideas and research results.

At Facebook, we aspire to lead in both deploying and developing innovative privacy preserving technologies. Privacy preserving technologies enable Facebook to offer leading services while minimizing the data we collect, process, and retain. By integrating novel privacy preserving technologies into our products, we are building trustworthy experiences that people love to use.

To foster further innovation in this area and to deepen our collaboration with academia, Facebook is pleased to invite faculty to respond to this call for research proposals in privacy preserving technology. We anticipate awarding five research awards, each in the $50,000 to $100,000 range. This year, we are especially interested in proposals that fall into the following categories (however, proposal topics are not limited to these):

• Technologies to support users’ privacy rights
• Privacy preserving analytics and machine learning
• Data anonymization and quantification of privacy leaks
• Private, high-integrity, client-side services
• Privacy-by-design methodologies, technologies, toolkits, and frameworks
• Anonymity networks and peer-to-peer communication
• Encrypted data processing
• Techniques to proactively discover and surface privacy violations in complex applications
• Application-auditing methodologies to assure transparency, privacy, and compliance

“We are excited to launch this first privacy-related research award opportunity and look forward to receiving proposals,” says Sharon Ayalde, Facebook Research Program Manager, Academic Relations. “We plan to continue these types of opportunities in 2020 in the privacy space related to a few areas including ads, user experience, and reliability.”

Applications for this request for proposals are now open. Deadline to apply is Friday, December 20 at 11:59 p.m. AOE. For more information regarding proposal requirements, eligibility, and timing, visit the Privacy Preserving Tech RFP page.