Collaborative Research: CCRI: New: A Scalable Hardware and Software Environment Enabling Secure Multi-party Learning

在过去的十年中，机器学习的进步对许多现实世界的应用产生了重大影响，并在许多学科中取得了科学和工程上的突破。作为泛在计算下一阶段的一部分，协作学习的新时代正在出现，不同地点的研究人员将一起工作，将他们分别获得的不同数据联系起来，最终创建一个复杂的决策模型。因此，有必要建立一个支持协同、多方数据分析的平台，通过这个平台，参与各方可以在不同程度的隐私控制下相互共享他们的数据。参与者可以通过直接与服务器共享数据或仅与服务器共享其模型参数来计算彼此的数据，从而与其他各方协作得出解决方案。为了向社区提供这样的环境，该项目建立了一个可扩展且可信的硬件和软件环境，称为Bridge，以支持一般形式的协作机器学习。Bridge平台支持各种形式的可扩展多方学习和数据分析，包括集中式和分散式设置，并具有安全和隐私保证。该项目的新颖之处在于协同设计和集成硬件和软件创新，以及一套安全和隐私机制和工具，以支持各种类型的多方机器学习。该项目的影响是使不同社区的CISE研究人员能够在计算机和信息科学与工程领域开展合作研究，并为个人和组织带来巨大的社会和经济效益。少数民族学生和服务不足的人群将参与研究活动，以创造一个包容的环境，每个人都为尖端科学研究做出贡献并从中受益。桥梁平台将开发统一的硬件和软件基础设施，实现多方学习的硬件和软件协同设计。算法软件基础结构旨在支持分布式、联合和多模态模型的学习和共享。Bridge平台集成了密码学（安全的多方计算）和基于噪声的方法（差分隐私），以在从数据收集到输出的整个过程中提供隐私。Bridge平台提供了一组集成数据访问、AutoML、团队创建、机器学习模型漏洞评估和异构特征嵌入的工具，以支持灵活的用户应用程序。Bridge平台通过开发先进的技术来改进异步模型更新、通信效率、快速收敛和垂直数据分区，从而确保任务数量、用户数量和数据类型的异构性的可伸缩性。桥梁平台构建了一个协作学习社区，加速了计算机与信息科学与工程（CISE）核心领域的许多新研究领域，如先进机器学习和数据科学、数据隐私和可信赖人工智能、硬件、软件和机器学习融合研究、智能物联网等。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Advances in machine learning have made a major impact on many real-world applications over the past decade, and have achieved scientific and engineering breakthroughs across many disciplines. A new era of collaborative learning is emerging as part of the next phase of ubiquitous computing, wherein researchers at different sites will work together to correlate the disparate data they have separately acquired and eventually create a sophisticated decision-making model. It is thus imperative to establish a platform to support collaborative, multi-party data analysis, through which the participating parties can share their data with each other with different degrees of privacy control. The participants can compute with each other's data, by either directly sharing data with the server or only sharing their model parameters with the server to collaboratively derive a solution with other parties. To make such an environment available to the community, this project establishes a scalable and trusted hardware and software environment, termed Bridge, to support a general form of collaborative machine learning. The Bridge platform enables scalable multi-party learning and data analysis in a variety of forms, in both centralized and decentralized settings, with security and privacy guarantees. The project's novelties are to synergistically design and integrate both hardware and software innovation as well as a suite of security and privacy mechanisms and tools to support various types of multi-party machine learning. The project's impacts are to enable collaborative research efforts in diverse communities of CISE researchers pursuing focused research agendas in computer and information science and engineering, and generate enormous social and economic benefits to individuals and organizations. The minority students and under-served populations will be engaged in research activities to create an inclusive environment where everyone contributes to and benefits from cutting-edge scientific research.The Bridge platform will develop a unified hardware and software infrastructure to achieve hardware and software co-design for multi-party learning. An algorithmic software infrastructure is designed to support distributed, federated, and multi-modal model learning and sharing. The Bridge platform integrates cryptographic (secure multi-party computation) and noise-based methods (differential privacy) to provide privacy across the entire process from data collection to output. The Bridge platform provides a set of tools on integrated data access, AutoML, team creation, machine learning model vulnerability evaluation, and heterogeneous feature embeddings to support flexible user applications. The Bridge platform ensures the scalability in the number of tasks, the number of users, and heterogeneity of data types by developing advanced techniques to improve asynchronous model updates, communication efficiency, fast convergence, and vertical data partition. The Bridge platform builds a collaborative learning community and accelerates many new research areas in the core Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE), such as advanced machine learning and data science, data privacy and trustworthy AI, convergent research among hardware, software and machine learning, and intelligent internet of things.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.