CANTON — A doctoral candidate from Lorraine University in Nancy, France, is making strides with big data while working at SUNY Canton as a visiting researcher.

Ala Eddine Laouir joined the college's Cybersecurity program for one semester as part of the final steps in completing his Ph.D. on data confidentiality in large or complex data sets. He has also joined the college's Advanced Information Security and Privacy research lab and has helped mentor undergraduate students.

"Ala is assigned to work on several research projects, including differential privacy and security concerns with large language models," said Kambiz Ghazinour Naiani, associate professor and Cybersecurity program director. "His Ph.D. Advisor, Professor Abdessamad Imine from Lorraine University, and I are collaborating under an agreement between our two colleges."

Laouir has coauthored a scholarly work slated for publication. "SLIM-View: Sampling and Private Publishing of Multidimensional Databases" was accepted as a paper for the 14th ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy to be held June 19 in Porto, Portugal.

The paper discusses problems with handling large amounts of data while keeping sensitive information private. The authors introduce a solution called SLIM-View, which combines a method of making data more manageable and another to protect privacy. SLIM-View outperforms existing approaches available due to its impressive resource efficiency and ability to ensure equal levels of privacy.

The Cybersecurity bachelor's degree prepares students to assess computer and network system security needs, develop safeguard solutions and manage the implementation of security devices. It is designated as a Center of Excellence in Cyber Defense by the National Security Agency and Department of Homeland Security.

Laouir taught Cryptography, Information Security and Digital Forensics at the college during the spring semester. He is one of about a dozen research assistants working with the Cybersecurity program. International scholars join traditional SUNY Canton students to conduct extensive research in the fields of privacy, encryption and authentication.