USC + Amazon Center on Secure and Trusted Machine Learning selects initial research projects

The USC + Amazon Center on Secure and Trusted Machine Learning, established in January 2021 to support fundamental research and development of new approaches to machine learning (ML) privacy, security, and trustworthiness, today announced it has selected five research projects for 2021-2022.

 “We had a very enthusiastic response by USC faculty for the first call for proposals for the USC+Amazon center,” said Salman Avestimehr, the inaugural director of the USC + Amazon Center, as well as a dean’s professor of electrical and computer engineering, and computer science at USC, and an Amazon Scholar. “We received innovative proposals from our faculty proposing exciting research into various aspects of trustworthy machine learning. The response was so overwhelming that we decided to fund one more project than our original intention, and at the end we selected the following five research projects to be funded for the first year of the center.”

• “Federated Learning for Human-centered Experience and Perception Modeling with Biobehavioral Data” (Shrikanth Narayanan);

Prem Natarajan, vice president, Alexa AI, and executive liaison for the center, added, “We are delighted by the quality and diversity of the proposals from the faculty at USC. It is exciting to see this collaboration  gather momentum and we look forward to the advances that these research efforts will generate.”

“It is wonderful to see the strong response from our faculty to this inaugural round of proposals. It reflects the high quality of our faculty and students in this exciting research area and provides a solid start to a great partnership with Amazon,” said Yannis Yortsos, dean of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering.

“We are particularly thankful to our advisory board members from USC and Amazon who generously helped with reviewing the submitted proposals,” Avestimehr added.

The center’s advisory board members are USC representatives Cyrus Shahabi, Helen N. and Emmett H. Jones Professor of Computer Science  and Chair of the Computer Science  Department; Kristina Lerman, research professor and research team leader at ISI, and Shri Narayanan, university professor and Niki & Max Nikias Chair in Engineering; and the Amazon advisory board members are Shankar Ananthakrishnan, director of applied science; Arindam Mandal, director of dialogue services; Shiv Vitaladevuni, director, applied science; and Prem Natarajan.