FedML – Building Open and Collaborative Machine Learning Anywhere at Any Scale

Abstract

Federated learning (FL) has emerged as a promising approach to enable decentralized machine learning directly at the edge, in order to enhance users’ privacy, comply with regulations, and reduce development costs.  In this talk, I will provide an overview of FL and highlight several key research directions in this area. In particular, I will discuss four important research directions of (1) privacy and security guarantees of FL; (2) FL over resource-constrained edge nodes; (3) label scarcity and self-supervised FL; and (4) scalable system design for FL. I will also provide an overview of FedML (https://fedml.ai), which is a machine learning platform that enables zero-code, lightweight, cross-platform, and provably secure federated learning and analytics. In particular, we will discuss four key components of FedML platform: (1) a user-friendly MLOps platform and open source library to simplify collaboration and real-world deployment for on-device learning over GPUs, smartphones, and internet of things (IoT); (2) platform-supported vertical solutions across a broad range of industries (healthcare, finance, insurance, smart cities, IoT, etc.) and applications (computer vision, natural language processing, data mining, and time-series forecasting).

Dr. Chaoyang He is Co-founder and CTO of FedML, Inc., a startup running for a community building open and collaborative AI from anywhere at any scale. His research focuses on distributed and federated machine learning algorithms, systems, and applications. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA, advised by Salman Avestimehr (USC), Professor Mahdi Soltanolkotabi (USC), and Professor Murali Annavaram (USC), and Professor Tong Zhang (HKUST). He also works closely with researchers/engineers at Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Tencent. Previously, he was an R and D team manager and principal software engineer at Tencent (2014-2018), a team leader and senior software engineer at Baidu (2012-2014), and a Ssoftware engineer at Huawei (2011-2012). He has received a number of awards in academia and industry, including Amazon ML Fellowship (2021-2022), Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship (2021-2022), Tencent Outstanding Staff Award (2015-2016), WeChat Special Award for Innovation (2016), Baidu LBS Group Star Awards (2013), and Huawei Golden Network Award (2012). More details are available at https://ChaoyangHe.com