Skip to main content

Privacy-preserving federated learning and Center for Digital Trust

CDIS Seminar

Welcome to this seminar arranged by the Centre for Cyber Defence and Information Security (CDIS).

Time: Tue 2023-06-13 11.15 - 12.00

Location: Lecture hall D3, KTH

Video link: https://kth-se.zoom.us/j/6529956822

Language: English

Participating: Prof. Jean-Pierre Hubaux

Export to calendar

Prof. Jean-Pierre Hubaux, Founder and Academic Director of the Center for Digital Trust, EPFL
Advisor to the Swiss federal government for cloud computing.

Abstract

This talk will address 2 distinct and complementary topic

1. Secure, privacy-preserving federated learningTo work properly, Machine Learning requires the access to large amounts of data. Yet, access to datasets can be difficult, because of regulations or because the controller considers its own data to be too sensitive or too precious. In this case, datasets remain in siloes, thus jeopardizing the ability to properly train ML models (e.g., neural networks) with enough data. We will present several results that show how to solve this problem, leveraging notably on recent advances ofhomomorphic encryption. We will detail how we applied this approach to oncology data in collaboration with hospitals, explain how we extended the field of applications to finance and cybersecurity and introduce the resulting start-up company Tune Insight SA

2. Center for Digital Trust (EPFL)

Over the last decades, nefarious activities over the Internet have dramatically increased. As a response to this challenge, five years ago we created the Center for Digital Trust (C4DT.epfl.ch). C4DT has attracted around 15 partner organizations (companies, governmental agencies, NGO and start-ups), including armasuisse (the research and procurement branch of the Swiss military). C4DT fosters the launch of bilateral projects, organizes events, publishes policy-oriented reports on technical matters, adapts EPFL software to respond to partners’ expectations and provides continuing education courses.We will present the operating principles of the center.

We will also discuss how to reconcile the usage of foreign cloud service providerswith respect to digital sovereignty.

Finally, we will say a few words about cybersecurity challenges faced by academic campuses, and how to address them.

The speaker will be available after the talk to discuss some of these items.

Short bio

Prof. Jean-Pierre Hubaux is the founder and academic director of the EPFL Center for Digital Trust (C4DT). For its whole duration (April 2018 - December 2021), he led the national Data Protection in Personalized Health (DPPH) project. From 2008 to 2019 he was one of the seven commissioners of the Swiss Federal Commission for Communications. He is a Fellow of both IEEE and ACM. Recent awards: three of his papers obtained distinctions at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, the flagship event on the topic (in 2015, 2018 and 2021). He is among the most cited researchers in privacy protection and in information security. He is a co-founder of Tune Insight SA.

Photograph: people.epfl.ch/jean-pierre.hubaux?lang=en