595D - Public and Private Knowledge in Life Cycle Assessment

Firms, trade associations, and governments all have various occasions to make assertions to the public about the environmental performance of their operations or products, such as an environmental product declaration, a labeling claim, or a sustainability report.  In most or all of these cases, knowledge of private information is required to support or validate the assertion.  Without this knowledge, public confidence in the assertion is limited by the public's trust in the entity making the claim.

This course will investigate the role of private data in preparing environmental assessments, how private data are protected during publication, and how the public may interpret published results without knowledge of the private data.  We will focus on life cycle assessment (LCA), the standard technique for computing quantitative indicators of environmental performance.  Standard and emerging techniques from computer science for privacy-preserving data publishing will be applied to the case of LCA publication.  The course will also explore some novel techniques for validating the results of computations while preserving the privacy of input data and exploring various approaches such as Secure Multi-Party Computations.

The course is a joint offering between Bren and Computer Science, with the intention to establish a dialogue between scholars of the two fields.  No prior knowledge of life cycle assessment, data privacy, or cryptography is required.