Future Projects - Institute of Applied Data Analytics

Private web search using query obfuscation

  • Institute of Applied Data Analytics
  • Contact:Shariq Bashir
  • Application invited for:


The aim of the project is to develop a novel Information Retrieval (IR) system, which is a web search facility, that uses our proposed proxy-terms based query obfuscation technique that allows users to search information through proxy queries without submitting true queries, harnessing the high computational and storage power of High Performance Computing (HPC). As part of the IR system architecture to support 1) data collection of large amount of retrieved documents from the web and 2) to support high computational, intelligent IR processing of documents using smart and artificial intelligence technologies, a HPC infrastructure will be incorporated. As a first project, we will focus in the medical domain. Not only will the large amount of data collect enable us to develop novel IR systems, it allows us to do research in the areas of medical web search privacy and use of HPC in medical analytics or big data medical analytics and infrastructure. Search engines store users’ queries in query log. However, query log causes privacy concerns. Private web search (PWS) provides privacy-preserving technique that allows users to retrieve information from IR system without revealing true search queries. Existing techniques achieve web search privacy in an isolated manner without considering similarity between consecutive queries. In this project, we want to propose a proxy-terms based query obfuscation technique that allows users to search information through proxy queries without submitting true queries.