For the past 20 years, Dr. Clifton has served as a professor in the Purdue University Department of Computer Science and the Department of Statistics – conducting extensive research on Data Mining and Database Management System Security. He has a rich academic and professional private sector career focusing on technical solutions to advance data privacy. This includes privacy-preserving data mining, data de-identification and anonymization, and limits on identifying individuals from models.  Other research includes fairness issues and techniques applied to interoperation of heterogeneous information sources.  Fundamental challenges posed by these applications include extracting knowledge from noisy data, identifying knowledge in highly skewed data, and limits on learning. 

Purdue course curricula have included Database Systems, Information Security, Information Retrieval, Advanced Topics in Distributed Systems, and Data Mining and Security. He has also served as Program Director in the Information and Intelligent Systems division of the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering at the National Science Foundation. Private sector experience has included Principal Scientist at the MITRE Corporation in the Component Based Architectures and Data Management Department of the Information Technology Center where he received the Senior Vice President/General Manager's Award for his work supporting the US Air Force Joint Battlespace Infosphere. At Almaden - IBM's Silicon Valley innovation lab, he worked with a team of other scientists to design a dynamic load balancing system and ensure system multiple processor system integrity. At Northwestern University, he conducted research on database management systems for applications with loosely-structured data; in particular software database and heterogeneous databases. He has also worked in support of US Department of Homeland Security and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in piloting innovative software solutions to compelling national security needs.

He has held the following positions and distinctions:

• Fellow, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
• Research Award Recipient, 2020 Association for Computing Machinery, Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy
• IBM Graduate Fellowship 
• Dr. Clifton has lectured internationally and published extensively on the intersection of technology, national security, and data privacy (https://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/clifton/cv/). 

Education:

• PhD, MA, Princeton University
• MS, BS, Massachusetts Institute of Technology