Reminiscences

Abstract

I first met Steve during a talk I was giving at Carnegie Mellon in 2003 describing very early thoughts on a cryptography-flavored approach to privacy in public databases.  Some of these ideas arose during Adam Smith's internship with me at Microsoft.  Steve was critical (``Your utility is going to be in the toilet''), but I think he was intrigued by the cryptographic approach, since after the talk he proposed that we have a workshop (``Your bring your guys and I'll bring mine'').  This occurred during the summer of 2005 in the hillside town of Bertinoro, Italy.  The workshop almost broke down on the second day: the statisticians thought the cryptographers, with their talk of ``the adversary'' and its arbitrary auxiliary information, were completely paranoid, while the cryptographers were frustrated by the absence of a formal notion of privacy and a measure of its loss in the statistical work.  Fortunately, there is little to do in Bertinoro at night, other than to drink grappa in the piazza, and this eased the tension considerably.  Later in the workshop Steve proposed to Alan Karr and me that we found a journal and, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein, we have and this is it.