Oluwaseyi Feyisetan, a senior applied scientist who specializes in privacy research, was recently named to the research advisory board for the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP). The IAPP is “the largest and most comprehensive global information privacy community and resource.” The organization, which was founded in 2000, “helps define, promote and improve the privacy profession globally.”
“It’s quite exciting to be part of the board,” Feyisetan said. “If you look at the people who are currently on the board and people who were on the board previously, it’s quite an impressive mix of people with varying academic, legal, and scientific backgrounds. So, I was excited when I found out that I had been accepted to the board.”
Board members serve two-year terms and are “selected with the goal of creating a balanced working group based on experience level, industry sector, geographic location, and area of expertise.” The IAPP seeks advisory board members who have “long-term or widely recognized excellence in academia or practice or professional experience and knowledge of privacy and data protection laws, regulations, policies, procedures, best practices and theory.”
Feyisetan was the lead organizer of a privacy in natural language processing workshop series held at WSDM 2020, EMNLP 2020, and NAACL 2021. He is the lead or co-author of six publications in his time at Amazon, including Leveraging hierarchical representations for preserving privacy and utility in Text and Preserving privacy in analyses of textual data.
He also holds multiple pending patents with Amazon on privacy. Feyisetan, who is from Nigeria, studied in the UK, obtaining a PhD in crowdsourcing at the University of Southampton and a master’s degree at King’s College in London.
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His team at Amazon works to raise the privacy bar from both a data and a machine learning perspective. “This involves developing new privacy enhancing technologies and helping teams adopt those across Alexa domains,” Feyisetan explained. “It also involves designing metrics and setting thresholds to continually evaluate that machine learning models are privacy preserving. I also work with leadership, legal, product, engineering, and infrastructure teams to iterate on our privacy roadmap.”
Feyisetan said being named to the board gives him a unique opportunity to use his expertise to help shape the future direction of the IAPP. “The research advisory board plays an important role,” he noted. “It helps identify which issues the organization should be working on, things like data protection laws, regulation, policies, best practices, and then providing guidance and insights to steer the direction of IAPP.” The full list of IAPP research advisory board members can be found here.
