George T. Duncan
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Professor of Statistics (joint appointment with the Department of Statistics) |
Professional Background
George Duncan joined the Carnegie Mellon faculty in the Department of Statistics in 1974. He has been on the Heinz School faculty since 1978. He has served as Director of the Heinz School’s MS, MPM and Ph.D. Programs. He served as Associate Dean for Faculty from 2001 to 2002. Prior to coming to Carnegie Mellon University, he taught in the mathematics department at the University of California at Davis. He is a Visiting Faculty Member at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He has been a visitor at Cambridge University and was the Lord Simon Visiting Professor at the University of Manchester in 2005. Duncan holds a B.S. and M.S. in Statistics from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of Minnesota.
Honors
Duncan is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, and an Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute. In 1996, he was elected Pittsburgh Statistician of the Year.
Research
Duncan's general research interests are in Bayesian decision making and information technology and social accountability. His primary focus is on confidentiality of statistical databases. His work has appeared in leading journals including the Journal of the American Statistical Association, Management Science, Econometrica, Operations Research, Psychometrika, and Biometrika. He has given keynote presentations in New Zealand, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and England.
Teaching
His recent teaching includes statistical theory, advanced empirical methods, Bayesian inference, probabilistic methods in information technology, and management science.
Community Service
As a Peace Corps volunteer in the Philippines from 1965 to 1967, Duncan taught at Mindanao State University. He served as editor of the Journal of the American Statistical Association (ASA); Secretary of the Statistical Educational Section of ASA; Chair of the ASA Committee on Statistics in Selected Professions; Chair of the Committee on Privacy and Confidentiality of ASA.
Between 1989 and 1993, he chaired the National Academy of Sciences' Panel on Confidentiality and Data Access, which resulted in the book, Private Lives and Public Policies: Confidentiality and Accessibility of Government Statistics. He has served on privacy and confidentiality committees of the American Medical Association, the National Research Council's Institute of Medicine, and The University of Michigan. He has served on National Academy of Sciences Panels on Research Access to Data, Use of Census Data in Transportation Studies, and Whither Biometrics?.
Selected Publications
Book
Private Lives and Public Policies: Confidentiality and Accessibility of Government Statistics George T. Duncan, Thomas B. Jabine, and Virginia A. de Wolf; Panel on Confidentiality and Data Access, National Academy Press, 1993
Articles
Exploring the Tension Between Privacy and the Social Benefits of Governmental Databases. Invited paper in Security, Privacy, and Technology edited by Podesta, Shane and Leone. The Century Foundation, 2004
Disclosure Risk vs. Data Utility: The R-U Confidentiality Map as Applied to Topcoding. Invited paper in special issue on Data Confidentiality in Chance (joint authored with S. Lynne Stokes), 2004
"Mediating the Tension Between Information Privacy and Information Access: The Role of Digital Government," George T. Duncan and Stephen Roehrig Public Information Technology: Policy And Management Issues, edited by G. David Garson, Idea Group, Hershey, PA 2003
Policy and practice on release of microdata. Proceedings of the 19th CEIES Seminar, “Innovative Solutions in Providing Access to Microdata. Eurostat. Lisbon, 2002 September 26.
"Confidentiality and Statistical Disclosure Limitation" International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioral Sciences (2001)
"Forecasting analogous time series" (with Wilpen L. Gorr and Janusz Szczypula), Principles of Forecasting: A Handbook for Researchers and Practitioners (J. Scott Armstrong, ed.), Norwell, Ma: Kluwer Publishers, 2001
"Bayesian Insights on Disclosure Limitation: Mask or Impute?" (joint-authored with Sallie Keller-McNulty) Proceedings of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis, Crete (2000)
"Optimal disclosure limitation strategy in statistical databases: Deterring tracker attacks through additive noise" (joint authored with Sumitra Mukherjee) Journal of the American Statistical Association (2000)
Click here for a listing of current Working Papers authored by Professor Duncan