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Westat staff participated in the recent 2024 Privacy and Public Policy Conference hosted to promote and strengthen collaboration among privacy experts, researchers, data stewards, data practitioners, and public policymakers. The conference was held at the McCourt School of Public Policy, Georgetown University, and Westat was one of the sponsors of the event.
Westat’s Medha Uppala, PhD, presented research on select synthetic data generation. Other coauthors for this work included Minsun Riddles, PhD; Tom Krenzke, MS; Lin Li, MS; Angela Chen, MS; Robyn Ferg, PhD, of Westat; and Natalie Shlomo, PhD, of the University of Manchester.
Uppala discussed the process of generating synthetic data for 2 national surveys with distinct objectives, clarifying the rationale behind each project to illustrate how their approaches were tailored to account for the intended end product, the specific purpose of the data, and its application. This presentation not only highlighted the nuances of synthetic data generation but also demonstrated thoughtful strategies for protecting privacy of the respondents. It sparked a lively discussion on various aspects of synthetic data generation among researchers involved in similar projects across different sectors.