(Purdue CS) 12-04-2019 Professor Christopher Clifton has been named an IEEE Fellow as part of the 2020 class. Elevation to IEEE Fellow is the organization’s highest grade of membership and is recognized by the technical community as a prestigious honor and an important career achievement. Clifton is being recognized for his contributions to privacy protection in data analysis. The total number selected in any one year cannot exceed one-tenth of one- percent of the total voting membership.

Clifton joined the Purdue Computer Science faculty in 2001. His primary area of research is data privacy, particularly with respect to analysis of private data. This includes privacy-preserving data mining, data de-identification and anonymization, and limits on identifying individuals from data mining models. He also works more broadly in data mining, including data mining of text and data mining techniques applied to interoperation of heterogeneous information sources. Fundamental data mining challenges posed by these applications include extracting knowledge from noisy data, identifying knowledge in highly skewed data and limits on learning. He also works on database support for widely distributed and autonomously controlled information, particularly issues related to data privacy.

From September 2013-December 2015, he served as a Program Director at the National Science Foundation in the Information and Integration and Informatics cluster, also working with the Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace Program. Prior to joining Purdue, Dr. Clifton was a principal scientist in the Information Technology Division at the MITRE Corporation. Clifton received his PhD and MA from Princeton University in Computer Science and his MS in Computer Science and Engineering and BS degrees in both Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT.

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