Welcome to The Salon!

The Salon is a group dedicated to the study of Statistics, Algorithms, Learning, and OptimizatioN. It is led by Professor Gautam Kamath at the Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. Its members are also affiliated with the Vector Institute. Current emphases of the group include enriching our understanding of data privacy and robustness in statistics and machine learning.

The name of The Salon is in reference to the French practice from the 17th and 18th centuries, a central venue for exchange of some of the most important ideas of the era.

News

Recent Publications

Xin Gu, Gautam Kamath, Zhiwei Steven Wu
April 2025 Proceedings of the 2025 IEEE Conference on Secure and Trustworthy Machine Learning (SaTML 2025)

Choosing Public Datasets for Private Machine Learning via Gradient Subspace Distance

PDF
Jie Zhang, Debeshee Das, Gautam Kamath, Florian Tramèr
April 2025 Proceedings of the 2025 IEEE Conference on Secure and Trustworthy Machine Learning (SaTML 2025)

Position: Membership Inference Attacks Cannot Prove that a Model Was Trained On Your Data

PDF
Christian Janos Lebeda, Matthew Regehr, Gautam Kamath, Thomas Steinke
April 2025 Proceedings of the 2025 IEEE Conference on Secure and Trustworthy Machine Learning (SaTML 2025)

Avoiding Pitfalls for Privacy Accounting of Subsampled Mechanisms under Composition

PDF
Sushant Agarwal, Gautam Kamath, Mahbod Majid, Argyris Mouzakis, Rose Silver, Jonathan Ullman
January 2025 Proceedings of the 36th Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA 2025)

Private Mean Estimation with Person-Level Differential Privacy

PDF
Christian Covington, Xi He, James Honaker, Gautam Kamath
January 2025 Statistica Sinica

Unbiased Statistical Estimation and Valid Confidence Intervals Under Differential Privacy

PDF
See all publications

Members

Le Salonneur

Avatar

Gautam Kamath

Assistant Professor of Computer Science

Statistics, Machine Learning, Data Privacy, Robustness

Graduate Researchers

Avatar

Argyris Mouzakis

PhD Computer Science Student

Machine Learning Theory, Algorithmic Statistics, Privacy, Applied Probability

Avatar

Jimmy Di

MMath in Computer Science Student

Machine Unlearning, Privacy, Robustness

Avatar

Matthew Regehr

Phd Computer Science Student

Machine Learning, Differential Privacy, Reinforcement Learning

Undergraduate Researchers

Avatar

Valentio Iverson

BMath in Computer Science

Machine Learning Theory, Probability & Statistics, Optimization

Affiliated Researchers

Avatar

Shubhankar Mohapatra

PhD Computer Science Student

Data Privacy, Machine Learning, Federated Learning, Data Cleaning

Avatar

Yiwei Lu

PhD Computer Science Student

Machine Learning, Data Poisoning, Robustness