About the Project
AI_CDT_DecisionMaking
Details
The goal of this project is to investigate new methods to incorporate privacy and/or robustness in machine learning algorithms. Only recently, privacy and robustness have been studied in theoretical statistics, answering questions such as: What is the best possible performance for a statistical estimator which respects a certain level of privacy, or a certain level of robustness? What are algorithms that achieve near-optimal performance? Many algorithms that have been shown to achieve state-of-the-art performance are impractical to implement, and the problems which have been studied rigorously are quite limited in scope. Even the specific notions of (differential) privacy and (adversarial) robustness are evolving topics in theoretical machine learning, and the precise definitions must be considered carefully when deriving rigorous mathematical results.
This project will focus on studying machine learning algorithms for networked-structured data. Some of the sub-problems to be explored involve learning communities in an unlabeled graph, inference in dynamically changing random graphs, and estimation in settings where the graph and edge weights contain information concerning interactions between agents who seek to jointly solve a statistical inference problem. All of these problems have been studied in some form in recent years *without* privacy or robustness constraints, and the goal will be to determine how such constraints can be incorporated into existing algorithmic frameworks in a computationally feasible manner. Since privacy and robustness both concern stability of an algorithm, a higher-level question is to establish a practically efficient pipeline by which private algorithms can be converted into robust algorithms, and vice versa.
The University actively supports equality, diversity and inclusion and encourages applications from all sections of society. We place major emphasis on the importance of team work and an enjoyable work environment as a foundation for performing internationally leading research. This will allow the student to acquire cutting edge research methodologies in a supportive environment, where they can focus on making the best possible scientific progress.