What did you do before your thesis at the INSA CVL ?

I did my PhD in Topology and Algebra which is a branch of pure mathematics. My thesis was about the ring of continuous functions and also I had a grant to spend 6 months in a foreign country to work on my thesis that I spent in South Africa, Johannesburg, UNISA in 2015 which was a lattice and Frame theoretic extension of my thesis.
You were working in Iran and collaborating with researchers from several countries : why did you choose a PhD in France/ at the INSA CVL ? How did you find the thesis offer?

After my thesis I tried to to find an application and real problems that I can use my  theoretical background so I started working with Prof. Alessandra Palmiginao which is Dr. Sabine Frittella’s colleague on a subject common between three of us and some other researchers which was about Rough concepts which is a unficatin of formal concept analysis and Rough set theories, which are mathematical tools used to study uncertainty and vague information. During our collaboration with Sabine Frittella I got familiar with my PhD project which is Dynamic epistemic logic for privacy.

What is the subject of your research ?

Online services such as e-admin, e-banking, etc. Use complex decision processes (fed by forms) to calibrate the offer they make to each applicant.? These decision processes require many personal data items, which are subsequently processed and stored. Removing from users’ application forms the personal data items, which are not strictly useful for its subsequent evaluation by a service provider, is imposed by privacy laws enacted European laws, and is useful for both service providers and users.

In this project, we aim at formalizing and implementing algorithms that reduce the data collected to the strict minimum given a decision process. We aim at developing a mathematical framework to formalise privacy issues emerging through the ever growing collection of personal data. The issues at stake necessitate to develop specific probabilistic epistemic logics. Indeed, we need to formalize probabilistic reasoning to model the knowledge a malicious person can deduce from collected private data. In fact, one need a logic for reasoning about : probabilistic information and potentially contradicting information. To do so, we need to use non-classical probabilities and non-classical logics.

You’re in 2nd year of thesis, what did you achieve on the global schedule and what are the next steps ?

What we have done until now is creating a modular logical framework to formalize belief based on incomplete / inconsistent probabilistic information which is a necessity for studying and modeling the knowledge a malicious person
can deduce from collected private data.

The outputs until now are the followings:

1) Belief based on inconsistent information, Advances in Modal Logic, Helsinki, Finland, August 2020. (workshop presentation)

2) Belief based on inconsistent information, Dynamic Logic: New Trends and Applications, Prague, the Czech Republic, October 2020.

3) Belief based on inconsistent information,  M. Bilkovà, S. Frittella, O. Majer and S. Nazari., Dynamic  Logic.  New Trends  and  Applications, pages 68–86, Cham, 2020. Springer International Publishing.

Sajad NAZARI – Doctorant