The Transparent Accountable datamining Initiative (TAMI) Project is creating technical, legal, and policy foundations for transparency and accountability in large-scale aggregation and inferencing across heterogeneous information systems. The incorporation of transparency and accountability into decentralized systems such as the Web is critical to help society manage the privacy risks arising from the explosive progress in communications, storage, and search technology. The expansion of government use of large-scale data mining for law enforcement and national security provides a compelling motivation for this work. While other investigations of the impact of data mining on privacy focus on limiting access to data as a means of protecting privacy, a variety of social, political, and technical factors are making it increasingly difficult to limit collection of and access to personal information. This Project is addressing the risks to privacy protection and the reliability of conclusions drawn from increasing ease of data aggregation from multiple sources by creating methods and technologies for adding increased transparency and accountability of the inferencing and aggregation process itself. The project is developing precise rule languages that are able to express policy constraints and reasoning engines that are able to describe the results they produce.
Public Policy Advisory Council composed of public policy officials from US Government and other organizations will meet periodically to evaluate the implications of the research and to influence its direction to be relevant to the needs of users.
Research results including publications, technical reports, demos, and software components will be available on the Project website [http://dig.csail.mit.edu/TAMI].
Along with technology development, the Project is investigating public policy implications of the research. The results of the Project are being incorporated into two undergraduate courses at MIT and are being made available on MIT's Open CourseWare System [http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html]. Through the involvement with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) [http://www.w3.org/] the team is in a unique position to help disseminate the work developed under this project to the industrial community.
