David Page, PhD, James B. Duke Professor and chair of the Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics, was honored with a prestigious “Test of Time” Award at the 33rd USENIX Security Symposium in Philadelphia on August 14-16.
USENIX 2024 brought together experts from around the world to highlight the latest advances in the security and privacy of computer systems and networks.
Page received the USENIX Security Test of Time Award for his co-authored paper “Privacy in Pharmacogenetics: An End-to-End Case Study of Personalized Warfarin Dosing.” The USENIX Security Test of Time Award recognizes papers that have had a lasting impact on their fields. To qualify, a paper must have been presented at the USENIX Security Symposium at least 10 years ago.
Page and his co-authors presented the paper at the 2014 USENIX Security Symposium in San Diego. At the time, he was a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Medicine and Public Health.
In their paper, Page and his colleagues initiated the study of privacy in pharmacogenetics, in which machine learning models are used to guide medical treatments based on a patient’s genotype and background. They highlighted a new type of attack that could be used to learn information about the models' confidential training data, posing risks beyond pharmacogenetics.
“While the genomic variants here are not especially sensitive, they are a great stand-in for variants or other variables that might be highly sensitive in the future,” Page said.
Page and his former student Kendrick Boyd and Kevin Eng also received a Test of Time award at last year's European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles of Knowledge Discovery from Databases.