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Privacy-preserving record linkage (PPRL) addresses the problem of identifying matching records from different databases that correspond to the same real-world entities using quasi-identifying attributes (in the absence of unique entity identifiers), while preserving privacy of these entities. Privacy is being preserved by not revealing any information that could be used to infer the actual values about the records that are not reconciled to the same entity (non-matches), and any confidential or sensitive information (that is not agreed upon by the data custodians) about the records that were reconciled to the same entity (matches) during or after the linkage process. The PPRL process often involves three main challenges, which are scalability to large databases, high linkage quality in the presence of data quality errors, and sufficient privacy guarantees. While many solutions have been developed for the PPRL problem over the past two decades, an evaluation and comparison framework of PPRL solutions with standard numerical measures defined for all three properties (scalability, linkage quality, and privacy) of PPRL has so far not been presented in the literature. We propose a general framework with normalized measures to practically evaluate and compare PPRL solutions in the face of linkage attack methods that are based on an external global dataset. We conducted experiments of several existing PPRL solutions on real-world databases using our proposed evaluation framework, and the results show that our framework provides an extensive and comparative evaluation of PPRL solutions in terms of the three properties.

The purpose of this paper is threefold: First, to bring up the necessity of long life learning for adults along with the development of programming skills for students, in order adults and children to be competitive in a rapidly changing market and business world. Second, to briefly state the educational activities and synergies of the Educational Content Methodology & Technology Laboratory (e-CoMeT Lab) of the Hellenic Open University (HOU) aiming on democratizing education and offering the chance for distance learning to students from rural areas, girls, refuges and migrants with fewer opportunities to learn. And last but not least, to present the aims and the implementation procedure of the project Junior Coding Academy, a project implemented by e-CoMeT and Intermedi@KT, a Non-Profit Organization in Greece, that is still active and available for teachers and their students in order to acquire and develop their programming skills.