Private AI Collaborative Research Institute

Mission

the development of fundamental technologies that are instrumental in strengthening the security, Privacy and trustworthiness of decentralized artificial intelligence (AI)

Our Research Focus

The Private AI Collaborative Research Institute will focus its efforts on overcoming five main obstacles of the current centralized approach:

Training data is decentralized in isolated silos and often inaccessible.

Most data stored at the edge is privacy-sensitive and cannot be moved to the cloud.

Today’s solutions are insecure and require a single trusted data center.

Centralized training can be easily attacked by modifying data anywhere between collection and cloud. There is no framework for decentralized secure training among potentially untrusting participants.

Centralized models become obsolete quickly.

Infrequent batch cycles of collection, training, and deployment lead to outdated models, making continuous and differential retraining not possible.

Centralized compute resources are costly and throttled by communication and latency.

It requires vast data storage and compute as well as dedicated accelerators to make training viable.

Federated Machine Learning (FL) is limited.

While FL can access data at the edge, it cannot reliably guarantee privacy and security.

Principal Investigators

Technical University of Darmstadt
Principal Investigator and
Academic Coordinator:
Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi

Universitiy of Waterloo
Principal Investigator:
N. Asokan and
Florian Kerschbaum

University of Southern California
Principal Investigators:
Salman Avestimehr and
Murali Annavaram

University of Wuerzburg
Principal Investigator:
Alexandra Dmitrienko

University of California,
San Diego
Principal Investigator:
Farinaz Koushanfar

Université Catholique de Louvain
Principal Investigators:
Axel Legay and
Thomas Given-Wilson

University of Toronto
Principal Investigator:
Nicolas Papernot

Technical University of Darmstadt
Principal Investigator:
Thomas Schneider

National University of Singapore
Principal Investigator:
Reza Shokri

Carnegie Mellon University
Principal Investigator:
Virginia Smith

Want to learn more about the research projects?

Our Visionpaper

The goal of the Private AI Collsborative Institute is to push the state of the art on decentralized and privacy-preserving machine learning. Read more here: