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Wednesday, April 25, 2007 - 12:00pm

Paul Rowe

University of Pennsylvania

Location

University of Pennsylvania

DRL 3C6

Collaboration among organizations or individuals is common. While these participants are often unwilling to share all their information with each other, some information sharing is unavoidable when achieving a common goal. The need to share information and the desire to keep it private are two competing notions which affect the outcome of a collaboration. This paper proposes a formal model of collaboration which addresses privacy concerns. We draw on the notion of a plan which originates in the AI literature. We consider transition systems in which actions have pre- and post-conditions of the same size. We show it is PSPACE-complete to decide whether a given such system protects the privacy of its participants and whether it contains a plan leading from a given initial state to a desired goal state. This is joint work with Max Kanovich and Andre Scedrov.