[Distinguished Seminar] Security and Privacy for Distributed Optimization and Learning
Monday, February 20, 2023
11:00 am - 12:00 pm
Speaker
Nitin Vaidya, Ph.D.
Georgetown University
Host
Prof.
Gopal
Pandurangan聽
Location
PGH
232
Abstract
Consider a network of agents wherein each agent has a private cost function. In the context of distributed machine learning, the private cost function of an agent may represent the 鈥渓oss function鈥 corresponding to the agent鈥檚 local data. The objective here is to identify parameters that minimize the total cost over all the agents. In machine learning for classification, the cost function is designed such that minimizing the cost function should result in model parameters that achieve higher accuracy of classification. Similar optimization problems arise in the context of other applications as well.
Our work addresses privacy and security of distributed optimization, with applications to machine learning. In privacy-preserving machine learning, the goal is to optimize the model parameters correctly while preserving the privacy of each agent鈥檚 local data. In security, the goal is to identify the model parameters correctly while tolerating adversarial agents that may be supplying incorrect information. When a large number of agents participate in distributed optimization, security compromise or failure of some of the agents becomes increasingly likely. The talk will provide intuition behind the design and correctness of the algorithms.
About the Speaker
Nitin Vaidya is the McDevitt Chair of Computer Science at Georgetown University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He previously served as a Professor and Associate Head in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has co-authored papers that received awards at several conferences, including 2015 SSS, 2007 ACM MobiHoc and 1998 ACM MobiCom. He is a fellow of the IEEE. He has served as the Chair of the Steering Committee for the ACM PODC conference, as the Editor-in-Chief for the IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, and as the Editor-in-Chief for ACM SIGMOBILE publication MC2R.
