The UK and US governments have announced the 12 winners of the first phase of the UK and US Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs) Prize Challenge. Participants will compete for prizes from a combined US and UK prize pool of $1.6 million (£1.3 million), enabling organizations to train artificial intelligence models on sensitive data without exposing, sharing or combining the raw data. We are developing a solution to
The winning solutions will be presented at the second Democracy Summit, which President Joe Biden plans to convene in the first half of 2023. National Science Foundation (NSF).
“AI is driving rapid technological change driven by an ever-increasing variety of data, making privacy-enhancing technologies even more important,” said NIST Under Secretary of Commerce for Standards and Technology. said Laurie E. Locascio of “The US-UK PET Prize Challenge provides a global platform to build and showcase cutting-edge, scalable solutions that respect human rights and civil liberties. We are excited and look forward to their impact in enhancing privacy and powering trustworthy AI.”
Seturaman Panchanathan, Director of the National Science Foundation, said, “Such a first-of-its-kind international award challenge will focus innovators from the US and UK on overcoming the challenges of mature PET for practical use cases. I am letting you,” he said. “The level of participation and competence of participants in the US-UK PETs Prize Challenge promises to accelerate the translation of PETs into practice. We are looking forward to it and look forward to the results in the next phase.”
The 12 award-winning technical papers were selected from 76 entries in two challenge tracks. How to use PET to improve financial crime detection and predict an individual’s risk of infection during a pandemic, or how to design a solution that meets both scenarios. A total of $157,000 (£138,000) was awarded during this stage.
“Privacy-enhancing technology has the potential to unlock the power of data to tackle major societal challenges, from international money laundering to responding to global pandemics, in a way that respects the rights of citizens. Digital Infrastructure Julia Lopez, UK Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport: “That’s why world-class researchers on both sides of the Atlantic are innovating in ways that uphold our shared values.” I am pleased with the strength of the response to the challenge of the joint UK-US award, which has jumped on the challenge.”
In the first phase of the competition, teams of academic institutions, global technology companies, and privacy technology companies submitted white papers describing their approaches to privacy-preserving data analytics. In the second phase, which started in October 2022, the team started building the solution set out in the white paper. Challenge participants will have the opportunity to work with regulators and government agencies on guidance on developing solutions that uphold key regulatory principles.
In the United States, the following teams were awarded prizes:
- Team MusCAT — Researchers from the Broad Institute, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard Business School, University of Texas at Austin, University of Toronto
- Team IBM Research
- Team Secret Computers — Researcher at Inpher Inc.
In the UK, awards were given to the following organizations:
- Corvus Research Limited
- diagonal work
- GMV
- Faculty
- feature space limited
- OpenMined and DeepMind
- private limited
- Cambridge University
- University of Liverpool
In the third stage of the prize challenge, a “red team” launches a privacy attack on the most promising solutions, rigorously tests their privacy protection capabilities, and evaluates the final winners. Applications for the Red Team are open until November 23, 2022. A total of $225,000 (£200,000) in prize money will be awarded to the highest scoring Red Team.
Financial crime and public health truck solutions are developed using synthetic datasets that represent real-world use cases. The prize challenge organizers today announced that the synthetic banking data used in the financial crime challenge is based on data from global financial institutions He BNY Mellon and Deutsche Bank.
Financial crime track innovators are also working on synthetic global transaction data produced by SWIFT, a global provider of secure financial messaging services, with the help of MOSTLY AI. The public health track innovator uses a synthetic dataset created by the University of Virginia’s Institute for Biocomplexity.
The agenda planning is led by the UK’s Data Ethics and Innovation Center and Innovate UK, and the US White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, NIST and NSF.
Prize Challenge started in July 2022. For more information, visit petsprizechallenges.com.
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