Pii Minimization Handbook: Techniques, Challenges, and Solutions for Data Privacy Across Multiple Sectors

Patricia Thaine is the Co-Founder & Chairwoman of Private AI, a Microsoft-backed company whose technology enables organizations to detect, understand, redact, and anonymize their data at scale. Her R&D work focuses on privacy-preserving natural language processing, applied cryptography, re-identification risk, and maximizing the utility of data for AI and machine learning, the core challenges at the heart of PII minimization.

Patricia was named a 2023 Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum, and Private AI was recognized as a Gartner Cool Vendor in Privacy and won the Privacy Innovation Award at PICCASO 2024. She is a Vector Institute alumna, the co-inventor of a US patent, and brings over a decade of research and software development experience. Patricia hosts The Data Frontier podcast and was named to Maclean's Power List 2024 as one of the top 100 Canadians shaping the country.

Kathrin Gardhouse is Private AI's former Privacy Evangelist. She has since shifted into AI policy research with a focus on the EU and Canada. As a Senior AI Governance Associate at The Future Society and the Policy Lead of AI Governance and Safety Canada, she advises policymakers on risks from general-purpose and agentic AI and appropriate regulatory responses. As a Summer Research Fellow, she contributed to a legal commentary to the EU AI Act by the Institute for Law and AI, writing about the AI Office's enforcement powers. Kathrin is a lawyer by training and holds a philosophy PhD from McMaster University. She is certified by the IAPP as an Information Protection and AI Governance Professional.