Challenges

U.S.-U.K. Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs) Prize Challenge: Advancing Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning

The U.S. PETs Prize Challenge was co-sponsored by NIST and the National Science Foundation, in coordination with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. The U.S. PETs Prize Challenge ran in parallel with the U.K.’s PETs Prize Challenge, which was sponsored by the U.K. government's Responsible Technology Adoption Unit (RTA), previously known as the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation. 

2020 Differential Privacy Temporal Map Challenge

The NIST, PSCR Differential Privacy Temporal Map Challenge ran from October 2020 through June 2021 awarding $129,000 in cash prizes. The goal of the challenge was to seek innovative algorithms to de-identify public safety-related data with a privacy guarantee. The challenge also sought novel methods of evaluating the quality of synthetic data.

2018 Differential Privacy Synthetic Data Challenge

This challenge tasked participants with creating new methods, or improving existing methods of data de-identification, while preserving the dataset's utility for analysis. Competitors participated in three marathon matches on the Topcoder platform with the goal of designing, implementing, and proving that their synthetic data generation algorithm satisfied differential privacy. All solutions were required to satisfy the differential privacy guarantee, a provable guarantee of individual privacy protection. 

2018 The Unlinkable Data Challenge

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In this first data challenge, PSCR's The Unlinkable Data Challenge: Advancing Methods in Differential Privacy, contestants submitted concept papers proposing a mechanism to enable the protection of personally identifiable information while maintaining a dataset's utility for analysis. For the second data challenge, the Differential Privacy Synthetic Data Challenge, participants implemented their designs and empirically evaluated their performance on real data sets.