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Luc Rocher

I am a postodoctoral researcher at Imperial College London, in the Data Science Institute and the Computational Privacy Group. I received my PhD at the Université catholique de Louvain in Belgium. I was previously a research fellow affiliated with the F.R.S.-FNRS (Fund for Scientific Research), a visiting researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2014 and 2015, and studied both computer science and information architecture at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon.

I study the limits of privacy and anonymity in the modern age. My work challenges the technical and legal adequacy of current de-identification techniques and call for robust and transparent methods to restore trust in the data sharing economy; it has been covered in the New York Times, The Guardian, CNBC, The Telegraph, Forbes, El Pais, Scientific American, BBC.

News

Publications

  • Gadotti, A., Rocher, L., Houssiau, F., Cretu, A.-M., and de Montjoye Y. A. Anonymization: The imperfect science of using data while preserving privacy. Science Advances, 2024 (2024).

  • Rocher, L., Tournier, A. J., & de Montjoye, Y. A. Adversarial competition and collusion in algorithmic markets. Nature Machine Intelligence (2023).
    Selected Press: POLITICO Pro Fair Play, POLITICO Pro Morning Tech

  • Houssiau, F., Rocher, L. and de Montjoye Y. A. On the difficulty of achieving Differential Privacy in practice: user-level guarantees in aggregate location data. Nature Communications, 2022 (2022).

  • Gadotti A., Houssiau F., Rocher L., Livshits B., de Montjoye Y. A. When the signal is in the noise: Exploiting Diffix's Sticky Noise. 28th USENIX Security Symposium (2019).
    Selected Press: TechCrunch, Wall Street Journal

  • Rocher, L., Hendrickx, J. M., & de Montjoye, Y. A. Estimating the success of re-identifications in incomplete datasets using generative models. Nature communications, 10 (1), 3069 (2019).
    Selected Press: New York Times, Guardian, CNBC, The Telegraph, TechCrunch, Technology Review, New Scientist, Gizmodo, Scientific American, RT, Forbes, El Pais (ES), Sueddeutsche Zeitung (DE), Le Soir (FR), La Libre (FR), L'Echo (FR), De Morgen (NL)

  • de Montjoye Y. A., Farzanehfar A., Hendrickx J., Rocher L. Solving Artifical Intelligence's Privacy Problem. Field Actions Science Reports. The journal of field actions (Special Issue 17) pp 80-83 (2017).