Reinhard Munz
I have finished my PhD and am on the job market. I am looking for post-doc and research positions in academia and industry. [Resume | Research Statement]
Before, I was a PhD student under the supervision of Paul Francis in the Security & Privacy group at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS) in Germany.
I graduated with a MSIT degree with specialization in Very Large Information Systems from CMU, where I worked with Dave Andersen in his FAWN group.
My Vordiplom in Computer Science I received from the Institute of Computer Science at the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg.
My wonderful wife, Lisette, is a data scientist and PhD candidate in the Computational Social Science department at the GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences in Germany.
Research
My research interests revolve around systems and how they can be improved to benefit users, providers, and the environment. I am currently working in the area of system security and privacy, with a particular focus on private data analytics.
In my thesis I present the first steps towards usable privacy protection mechanisms for data analytics systems. Usable in my context means more queries and less distortion of answers than previous systems. I developed the UniTraX system, the first differentially private analytics system that is able to support personalized privacy budgets without giving up on answer accuracy.
With my thesis work I further laid the foundations for Diffix, a commercially deployed private analytics system. Diffix uses a defense in depth approach to privacy protection. It provides guarantees of usability to analysts and is one of the first systems to focus on usability in order to foster industry adoption of private analytics systems.
Before my work on usable privacy with Paul, Deepak, and Matteo, I improved user satisfaction during peak system loads with Allen and devised energy efficient and failure resilient mechanisms for large-scale distributed environments with Umut and Dave.
During my time in different research groups I always had and still have the pleasure to work with amazing people.
Some non-exhaustive sample: Arthur, Ekin, Ezgi, Fabienne, Imran, Iulian, Matt, Mike, Mustafa, Nancy, and Natacha.
Thanks guys! And thanks to all my other friends at MPI-SWS, CMU, and Uni Würzburg.
Publications
“Towards Usability in Private Data Analytics”. PhD thesis. Department of Computer Science, Technische Universität Kaiserslautern, 2019. [University publication server]
UniTraX: Protecting Data Privacy with Discoverable Biases. With Fabienne Eigner, Matteo Maffei, Paul Francis, and Deepak Garg. Conference on Principles of Security and Trust (POST), 2018. [Conference paper][Technical report with proofs][Gitlab repository]
Diffix: High-Utility Database Anonymization. With Paul Francis and Sebastian Probst Eide. Privacy Technologies and Policy (APF), 2017. [Conference paper][Preprint Diffix-Birch: Extending Diffix-Aspen 2019]
Persistent, Protected and Cached: Building Blocks for Main Memory Data Stores. With Iulian Moraru, David G. Andersen, Michael Kaminsky, Nathan Binkert, Niraj Tolia, and Parthasarathy Ranganathan. Carnegie Mellon University Parallel Data Lab Technical Report CMU-PDL-11-114v2, Nov 2012. [v2 Nov 2012][v1 Dec 2011]