Machine Learning is the study of methods for programming computers to learn. Computers are applied to a wide range of tasks, and for most of these it is relatively easy for programmers to design and implement the necessary software. However, there are many tasks for which this is difficult or impossible. These can be divided into four general categories. First, there are problems for which there exist no human experts. For example, in modern automated manufacturing facilities, there is a need to predict machine failures before they occur by analyzing sensor readings. Because the machines are new, there are no human experts who can be interviewed by a programmer to provide the knowledge necessary to build a computer system. A machine learning system can study recorded data and subsequent machine failures and learn prediction rules. Second, there are problems where human experts exist, but where they are unable to explain their expertise. This is the case in many perceptual tasks, such as speech recognition, hand-writing recognition, and natural language understanding. Virtually all humans exhibit expert-level abilities on these tasks, but none of them can describe the detailed steps that they follow as they perform them. Fortunately, humans can provide machines with examples of the inputs and correct outputs for these tasks, so machine learning algorithms can learn to map the inputs to the outputs. Third, there are problems where phenomena are changing rapidly. In finance, for example, people would like to predict the future behavior of the stock market, of consumer purchases, or of exchange rates. These behaviors change frequently, so that even if a programmer could construct a good predictive computer program, it would need to be rewritten frequently. A learning program can relieve the programmer of this burden by constantly modifying and tuning a set of learned prediction rules. Fourth, there are applications that need to be customized for each computer user separately. Consider, for example, a program to filter unwanted electronic mail messages. Different users will need different filters. It is unreasonable to expect each user to program his or her own rules, and it is infeasible to provide every user with a software engineer to keep the rules up-to-date. A machine learning system can learn which mail messages the user rejects and maintain the filtering rules automatically. Machine learning addresses many of the same research questions as the fields of statistics, data mining, and psychology, but with differences of emphasis. Statistics focuses on understanding the phenomena that have generated the data, often with the goal of testing different hypotheses about those phenomena. Data mining seeks to find patterns in the data that are understandable by people. Psychological studies of human learning aspire to understand the mechanisms underlying the various learning behaviors exhibited by people (concept learning, skill acquisition, strategy change, etc.).

Machine learning

Deposits of clastic carbonate-dominated (calciclastic) sedimentary slope systems in the rock record have been identified mostly as linearly-consistent carbonate apron deposits, even though most ancient clastic carbonate slope deposits fit the submarine fan systems better. Calciclastic submarine fans are consequently rarely described and are poorly understood. Subsequently, very little is known especially in mud-dominated calciclastic submarine fan systems. Presented in this study are a sedimentological core and petrographic characterisation of samples from eleven boreholes from the Lower Carboniferous of Bowland Basin (Northwest England) that reveals a >250 m thick calciturbidite complex deposited in a calciclastic submarine fan setting. Seven facies are recognised from core and thin section characterisation and are grouped into three carbonate turbidite sequences. They include: 1) Calciturbidites, comprising mostly of highto low-density, wavy-laminated bioclast-rich facies; 2) low-density densite mudstones which are characterised by planar laminated and unlaminated muddominated facies; and 3) Calcidebrites which are muddy or hyper-concentrated debrisflow deposits occurring as poorly-sorted, chaotic, mud-supported floatstones. These

Phd by thesis

Modern mobile devices have access to a wealth of data suitable for learning models, which in turn can greatly improve the user experience on the device. For example, language models can improve speech recognition and text entry, and image models can automatically select good photos. However, this rich data is often privacy sensitive, large in quantity, or both, which may preclude logging to the data center and training there using conventional approaches. We advocate an alternative that leaves the training data distributed on the mobile devices, and learns a shared model by aggregating locally-computed updates. We term this decentralized approach Federated Learning. 
We present a practical method for the federated learning of deep networks based on iterative model averaging, and conduct an extensive empirical evaluation, considering five different model architectures and four datasets. These experiments demonstrate the approach is robust to the unbalanced and non-IID data distributions that are a defining characteristic of this setting. Communication costs are the principal constraint, and we show a reduction in required communication rounds by 10-100x as compared to synchronized stochastic gradient descent.

Communication-Efficient Learning of Deep Networks from Decentralized Data

The problem of privacy-preserving data analysis has a long history spanning multiple disciplines. As electronic data about individuals becomes increasingly detailed, and as technology enables ever more powerful collection and curation of these data, the need increases for a robust, meaningful, and mathematically rigorous definition of privacy, together with a computationally rich class of algorithms that satisfy this definition. Differential Privacy is such a definition.After motivating and discussing the meaning of differential privacy, the preponderance of this monograph is devoted to fundamental techniques for achieving differential privacy, and application of these techniques in creative combinations, using the query-release problem as an ongoing example. A key point is that, by rethinking the computational goal, one can often obtain far better results than would be achieved by methodically replacing each step of a non-private computation with a differentially private implementation. Despite some astonishingly powerful computational results, there are still fundamental limitations — not just on what can be achieved with differential privacy but on what can be achieved with any method that protects against a complete breakdown in privacy. Virtually all the algorithms discussed herein maintain differential privacy against adversaries of arbitrary computational power. Certain algorithms are computationally intensive, others are efficient. Computational complexity for the adversary and the algorithm are both discussed.We then turn from fundamentals to applications other than queryrelease, discussing differentially private methods for mechanism design and machine learning. The vast majority of the literature on differentially private algorithms considers a single, static, database that is subject to many analyses. Differential privacy in other models, including distributed databases and computations on data streams is discussed.Finally, we note that this work is meant as a thorough introduction to the problems and techniques of differential privacy, but is not intended to be an exhaustive survey — there is by now a vast amount of work in differential privacy, and we can cover only a small portion of it.

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The Algorithmic Foundations of Differential Privacy

We continue a line of research initiated in [10, 11] on privacy-preserving statistical databases. Consider a trusted server that holds a database of sensitive information. Given a query function f mapping databases to reals, the so-called true answer is the result of applying f to the database. To protect privacy, the true answer is perturbed by the addition of random noise generated according to a carefully chosen distribution, and this response, the true answer plus noise, is returned to the user. Previous work focused on the case of noisy sums, in which f = Σ i g(x i ), where x i denotes the ith row of the database and g maps database rows to [0,1]. We extend the study to general functions f, proving that privacy can be preserved by calibrating the standard deviation of the noise according to the sensitivity of the function f. Roughly speaking, this is the amount that any single argument to f can change its output. The new analysis shows that for several particular applications substantially less noise is needed than was previously understood to be the case. The first step is a very clean characterization of privacy in terms of indistinguishability of transcripts. Additionally, we obtain separation results showing the increased value of interactive sanitization mechanisms over non-interactive.

Calibrating noise to sensitivity in private data analysis

Machine learning techniques based on neural networks are achieving remarkable results in a wide variety of domains. Often, the training of models requires large, representative datasets, which may be crowdsourced and contain sensitive information. The models should not expose private information in these datasets. Addressing this goal, we develop new algorithmic techniques for learning and a refined analysis of privacy costs within the framework of differential privacy. Our implementation and experiments demonstrate that we can train deep neural networks with non-convex objectives, under a modest privacy budget, and at a manageable cost in software complexity, training efficiency, and model quality.

Deep Learning with Differential Privacy

In this work we provide efficient distributed protocols for generating shares of random noise, secure against malicious participants. The purpose of the noise generation is to create a distributed implementation of the privacy-preserving statistical databases described in recent papers [14,4,13]. In these databases, privacy is obtained by perturbing the true answer to a database query by the addition of a small amount of Gaussian or exponentially distributed random noise. The computational power of even a simple form of these databases, when the query is just of the form ∑if(di), that is, the sum over all rows i in the database of a function f applied to the data in row i, has been demonstrated in [4]. A distributed implementation eliminates the need for a trusted database administrator.

The results for noise generation are of independent interest. The generation of Gaussian noise introduces a technique for distributing shares of many unbiased coins with fewer executions of verifiable secret sharing than would be needed using previous approaches (reduced by a factor of n). The generation of exponentially distributed noise uses two shallow circuits: one for generating many arbitrarily but identically biased coins at an amortized cost of two unbiased random bits apiece, independent of the bias, and the other to combine bits of appropriate biases to obtain an exponential distribution.

https://www.iacr.org/archive/eurocrypt2006/40040493/40040493.pdf

Our data, ourselves: privacy via distributed noise generation

We propose a natural relaxation of differential privacy based on the Renyi divergence. Closely related notions have appeared in several recent papers that analyzed composition of differentially private mechanisms. We argue that the useful analytical tool can be used as a privacy definition, compactly and accurately representing guarantees on the tails of the privacy loss.We demonstrate that the new definition shares many important properties with the standard definition of differential privacy, while additionally allowing tighter analysis of composite heterogeneous mechanisms.

Rényi Differential Privacy

We consider the problem of producing recommendations from collective user behavior while simultaneously providing guarantees of privacy for these users. Specifically, we consider the Netflix Prize data set, and its leading algorithms, adapted to the framework of differential privacy.Unlike prior privacy work concerned with cryptographically securing the computation of recommendations, differential privacy constrains a computation in a way that precludes any inference about the underlying records from its output. Such algorithms necessarily introduce uncertainty--i.e., noise--to computations, trading accuracy for privacy.We find that several of the leading approaches in the Netflix Prize competition can be adapted to provide differential privacy, without significantly degrading their accuracy. To adapt these algorithms, we explicitly factor them into two parts, an aggregation/learning phase that can be performed with differential privacy guarantees, and an individual recommendation phase that uses the learned correlations and an individual's data to provide personalized recommendations. The adaptations are non-trivial, and involve both careful analysis of the per-record sensitivity of the algorithms to calibrate noise, as well as new post-processing steps to mitigate the impact of this noise.We measure the empirical trade-off between accuracy and privacy in these adaptations, and find that we can provide non-trivial formal privacy guarantees while still outperforming the Cinematch baseline Netflix provides.

/pdf/differentially-private-recommender-systems-building-privacy-149rpndocp.pdf

Ilya Mironov

Papers

Deep Learning with Differential Privacy

Deep Learning with Differential Privacy

Our data, ourselves: privacy via distributed noise generation

Rényi Differential Privacy

Differentially private recommender systems: Building privacy into the Netflix Prize contenders