Large corporations, government entities and institutions such as hospitals and census bureaus routinely collect our personal and sensitive information for providing services. A key technological challenge is designing algorithms for these services that provide useful results, while simultaneously maintaining the privacy of the individuals whose data are being shared. Differential privacy (DP) is a cryptographically motivated and mathematically rigorous approach for addressing this challenge. Under DP, a randomized algorithm provides privacy guarantees by approximating the desired functionality, leading to a privacy–utility trade-off. Strong (pure DP) privacy guarantees are often costly in terms of utility. Motivated by the need for a more efficient mechanism with better privacy–utility trade-off, we propose Gaussian FM, an improvement to the functional mechanism (FM) that offers higher utility at the expense of a weakened (approximate) DP guarantee. We analytically show that the proposed Gaussian FM algorithm can offer orders of magnitude smaller noise compared to the existing FM algorithms. We further extend our Gaussian FM algorithm to decentralized-data settings by incorporating the $\mathsf{CAPE}$ protocol and propose $\mathsf{capeFM}$. Our method can offer the same level of utility as its centralized counterparts for a range of parameter choices. We empirically show that our proposed algorithms outperform existing state-of-the-art approaches on synthetic and real datasets.

Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) is one of the most common neuromuscular diseases which affects both lower and upper motor neurons. In this paper, a dilated one dimensional convolutional neural network, named ALSNet, is proposed for identifying ALS from raw EMG signal. No hand-crafted feature extraction is required, rather, ALSNet is able to take raw EMG signal as input and detect EMG signals of ALS subjects. This makes the method more feasible for practical implementation by reducing the computational cost required for extracting features. To our best knowledge, no research work for identification of ALS from raw EMG signal has been conducted yet. The performance of the ALSNet was evaluated using popular metrics such as overall accuracy, sensitivity, specificity and balanced accuracy and compared with other existing methods. The proposed method showed a better performance than the other existing methods with an overall accuracy of 97.74%.