Advanced Computing in the Age of AI | Friday, March 29, 2024

The Linux Foundation to Host the Federated AI Enabler to Responsibly Advance Data Modeling 

SHANGHAI, June 25, 2019 -- The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced it will host the FATE (Federated AI Technology Enabler). It is a federated learning framework that fosters collaboration across companies and institutes to perform AI model training and inference in accordance with user privacy, data confidentiality and government regulations. 4Paradigm, CETC Big Data Research Institute, Clustar, JD Intelligent Cities Research, Squirrel AI Learning, Tencent and WeBank are among the first organizations committed to the new Foundation.

There are many challenges today in developing responsible AI models, ranging from safety, fairness and data protection. FATE allows developers and data scientists to work collaboratively across different data controllers to advance AI models in a trustworthy way that protects data by design and adheres to government requirements, such as GDPR.

“A secure computing framework is critical for developers who are using data and models to build the latest applications across financial services, manufacturing, healthcare and more,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation. “It is exactly this kind of work that is a natural fit for the support of the Linux Foundation and the global open source community.”

FATE is an open-source project initiated by WeBank’s AI Group to provide a secure computing framework for building the federated AI ecosystem. It implements a secure computation version of various machine learning algorithms, including logistic regression, tree-based algorithms, deep learning and transfer learning. For developers who need more than out-of-box algorithms, FATE provides a framework to implement new machine learning algorithms in a secure MPC architecture.

“We aim to build a Federated AI ecosystem based on federated learning and transfer learning, so that anyone can fully enable their data values and promote innovative applications,” said Tianjian Chen, deputy general manager of WeBank AI Group and advocate of the FATE project. “The Linux Foundation is the leader in neutral homes for this kind of work to flourish, grow and become the industry standard.”

Meanwhile, FATE provides a series of toolkits to address semi-black box experimentation, secure computation cost and lifecycle management issues of federated AI models.

For more information, please visit: https://FedAI.org

About the Linux Foundation
Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation’s projects are critical to the world’s infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, and more. The Linux Foundation’s methodology focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.

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