Carmela Troncoso

Carmela González Troncoso (born 1982 in Vigo) is a Spanish telecommunication engineer and researcher specialized in privacy issues, and an LGBT+ activist. She is currently a scientific director at the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy, on leave from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. She is the head of the SPRING lab (Security and Privacy Engineering Laboratory). Troncoso gained recognition for her leadership of the European team developing the DP-3T protocol that aims at the creation of an application to facilitate the tracing of COVID-19 infected persons without compromising on the privacy of citizens. Currently she is also member of the Swiss National COVID-19 Science Task Force in the expert group on Digital Epidemiology. In 2020, she was listed among Fortune magazine's 40 Under 40. She continued at KU Leuven as a post-doc before joining Gradiant, the Galician Research and Development Center in Advanced Telecommunications, as a Security and Privacy Technical Lead. In October 2015 Troncoso joined the IMDEA Software Institute (Spain) as faculty member. Since November 2017 she has been a tenure track assistant professor at the SPRING lab (Security and Privacy Engineering Laboratory) at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. Datashare was used in the analysis of the Luanda Leaks.

Covid-19 pandemic In 2020, during the crisis of the Covid-19 pandemic, she leads a team of more than 30 people from eleven European institutions working to develop the DP-3T protocol under the umbrella of the Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (PEPP-PT) to create a computer application that tracks contacts and at the same time respects privacy with the aim of letting citizens know if they have been close to someone who days later tests positive for the virus. Google stated that it took inspiration from the DP-3T protocol. As an expert of the topic she also appeared on a number of panels and events such as the IMPACT2020 conference and the International Committee of the Red Cross' release of Data Protection Handbook for Humanitarian Action.

Distinctions In September 2020, Troncoso joined the ranks of "40 influential people" (40 Under 40) in the category technology nominated by the Fortune magazine.

Since 2020 Troncoso has been a member of the Swiss National COVID-19 Science Task Force, the scientific corona advisory board of the Swiss Federal Council and the cantons. She is a member of the expert group on Digital Epidemiology.

She is an awardee of the ERCIM WG STM Best Ph.D. Thesis Award (2011), the CNIL-INRIA Privacy Protection Award 2017 (Paper: Engineering privacy by design reloaded) and the Google Security and Privacy Research Award (2019).

Selected works

Gürses, S., Troncoso, C. and Diaz, C., 2011. Engineering privacy by design. Computers, Privacy & Data Protection, 14(3), p. 25. PDF.

Balasch, J., Rial, A., Troncoso, C., Preneel, B., Verbauwhede, I. and Geuens, C., 2010, August. PrETP: Privacy-Preserving Electronic Toll Pricing. In USENIX security symposium (Vol. 10, pp. 63–78). PDF. Pyrgelis, A., Troncoso, C. and De Cristofaro, E., 2017. Knock knock, who's there? Membership inference on aggregate location data. arXiv preprint .

Mittal, P., Olumofin, F.G., Troncoso, C., Borisov, N. and Goldberg, I., 2011, August. PIR-Tor: Scalable Anonymous Communication Using Private Information Retrieval. In USENIX Security Symposium (p. 31). PDF.