USC+Amazon Center Announces its Selected Projects for 2021-2022
The USC+Amazon Center on Secure and Trusted Machine Learning, established in January 2021 to support fundamental research and development of new approaches to machine learning (ML) privacy, security, and trustworthiness, today announced it has selected five research projects for 2021-2022.
“We had a very enthusiastic response by USC faculty for the first call for proposals for the USC+Amazon center,” said Salman Avestimehr, the inaugural director of the USC+Amazon Center, a Dean’s Professor of electrical and computer engineering, and computer science at USC, and an Amazon Scholar. “We received innovative proposals from our faculty proposing exciting research into various aspects of trustworthy machine learning. The response was so overwhelming that we decided to fund one more project than our original intention.” The following five research projects will be funded for the first year of the center:
- “Federated Learning for Natural Language Processing” (by Xiang Ren and Mahdi Soltanolkotabi )
- “Reconciling Privacy and Fairness in Federated Learning” (by Aleksandra Korolova )
- “Federated Learning for Human-centered Experience and Perception Modeling with Biobehavioral Data” (by Shrikanth Narayanan)
- “Fast Fair Decentralized Learning” (by Keith Burghardt)
- “Efficient Federated Learning in Heterogeneous and Corrupted Environments by Secure Performance Weighting” (by Jose Luis Ambite , Muhammad Naveed , and Paul Thompson)
Prem Natarajan, vice president, Alexa AI, and executive liaison for the center added, “We are delighted by the quality and diversity of the proposals from the faculty at USC. It is exciting to see this partnership gather momentum and we look forward to the advances that these research efforts will generate.”
“It is wonderful to see the strong response from our faculty to this inaugural round of proposals. It reflects the high quality of our faculty and students in this exciting research area and provides a solid start to a great partnership with Amazon,” said Yannis C. Yortsos, Dean of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering.
“We are particularly thankful to our advisory board members from USC and Amazon who generously helped with reviewing the submitted proposals,” Avestimehr added. The center’s advisory board members are USC representatives Cyrus Shahabi, Helen N. and Emmett H. Jones Professor of Computer Science and Chair of the Computer Science Department; Kristina Lerman, research professor and research team leader at ISI, and Shri Narayanan, University Professor and Niki & Max Nikias Chair in Engineering; and the Amazon advisory board members are Shankar Ananthakrishnan, director of applied science; Arindam Mandal, director of dialogue services; Shiv Vitaladevuni, director, applied science; and Prem Natarajan.
Published on July 13th, 2021
Last updated on May 19th, 2023