Posts

Project Feature Cloud – Pre-Project Meeting and Workshop successful

/in , , /by

From October, 21-22, 2018, the project partners of the EU RIA 826078 FeatureCloud project (EUR 4,646,000,00) met at the Technische Universität München, Campus Weihenstephan.  Starting from January, 1, 2019 the project partners will work jointly for 60 months on awesome topics around federated machine learning and explainability. The project’s ground-breaking novel cloud-AI infrastructure will only exchange learned representations (the feature parameters theta θ, hence the name “feature cloud”) which are anonymous by default. This approach is privacy by design or to be more precise: privacy by architecture. The highly interdisciplinary consortium, ranging from AI and machine learning experts to medical professionals covers all aspects of the value chain: assessment of cyber risks, legal considerations and international policies, development of state-of-the-art federated machine learning technology coupled to blockchaining and encompasing social issues and AI-ethics.

Federated Machine Learning – Privacy by Design won

/in , , /by

Federated machine learning – privacy by design EU-project granted!

Good news from Brussels: Our EU RIA project application 826078 FeatureCloud with a total volume of EUR 4,646,000,00 has just been granted. The project was submitted to the H2020-SC1-FA-DTS-2018-2020 call “Trusted digital solutions and Cybersecurity in Health and Care”. The lead is done by TU Munich and we are excited to work in a super cool project consortium together with our partners for the next 60 months. The project’s ground-breaking novel cloud-AI infrastructure only exchanges learned representations (the feature parameters theta θ, hence the name “feature cloud”) which are anonymous by default (no hassle with “real medical data” – no ethical issues). Collectively, our highly interdisciplinary consortium from AI and machine learning to medicine covers all aspects of the value chain: assessment of cyber risks, legal considerations and international policies, development of state-of-the.-art federated machine learning technology coupled to blockchaining and encompasing AI-ethics research. FeatureCloud’s goals are challenging bold, obviously, but achievable, and paving the way for a socially agreeable big data era for the benefit of future medicine. Congratulations to the great project consortium!

On-Device Machine Intelligence

/in , /by

One very interesting approach of federated machine learning is presented by Sujith Ravi from Google: Machine learning models (e.g. CNN) are sucessfully used for the design of intelligent systems capable of visual recognition, speech and language understanding. Most of these are running on a cloud – which is often inpredictable where it is physically running. A huge problem so far is that typical machine learning models are awkward to use on mobile devices due to both computational and memory constraints. While these devices could make use of models running on high-performance data centers with CPUs or GPUs, this is not feasible for many applications and scenarios where inference needs to be performed directly “on” device. This requires re-thinking existing machine learning algorithms and coming up with new models that are directly optimized for on-device machine intelligence rather than doing post-hoc model compression. Sujith Ravi is introducing a novel “projection-based” machine learning system for training compact neural networks. The approach uses a joint optimization framework to simultaneously train a “full” deep network and a lightweight “projection” network. Unlike the full deep network, the projection network uses random projection operations that are efficient to compute and operates in bit space yielding a low memory footprint. The system is trained end-to-end using backpropagation. Ravi shows that the approach is flexible and easily extensible to other machine learning paradigms, for example, they can learn graph-based projection models using label propagation. The trained “projection” models are then directly used for inference, please watch the origial video on:

 

Portfolio Items