The UK and US governments have announced the 12 winners of the first phase of the UK-US Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) Prize Challenge. To compete for cash prizes from a combined US-UK prize pool of US$1.6m (£1.3m), entrants are developing solutions that enable AI models to be trained on sensitive data without organizations having to disclose, share or combine their raw data .
Winning solutions to the challenge will be showcased at President Joe Biden’s second Democratic Summit planned for the first half of 2023. The US Challenge is funded and administered by the US Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and the US National Science Foundation (NSF).
“AI is driving rapid technological change based on ever-increasing volumes of disparate data, making privacy-enhancing technologies increasingly important,” said Laurie E. Locascio, Under Secretary of Commerce for Standards and Technology and NIST Director. “The US-UK PET Prize Challenge provides a global venue for building and demonstrating cutting-edge and scalable solutions that respect human rights and civil liberties. I am excited by the solutions these academics are proposing and look forward to their contribution to enhancing privacy and supporting trustworthy artificial intelligence.” Intellectual influence.”
“These first-of-its-kind international awards challenges focus innovators from the US and UK on overcoming the challenges of mature PET for practical use cases,” said Sethuraman Panchanathan, director of the US National Science Foundation. and capabilities are expected to accelerate the translation of PETs into practice. I am pleased to see the transatlantic research community’s prize challenge off to a good start and look forward to the results of the next phase.”
The 12 winning technical papers were selected from 76 entries across two challenge tracks: using PET to improve financial crime detection and predicting an individual’s risk of infection during a pandemic, or to design a solution that meets both. A total of US$157,000 (£138,000) has been allocated for this phase.
“Privacy-enhancing technologies have the potential to unleash the power of data to tackle major societal challenges – from international money laundering to tackling global pandemics – in a way that respects citizens’ rights,” said the Minister of State for Media, Data and Data. Digital Infrastructure Julia Lopez, UK Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. “That’s why I’m delighted with the strong response to the Anglo-American Prize challenge, with world-class researchers on both sides of the Atlantic taking on the innovation challenge in a way that upholds our shared values.”
In the first phase of the competition, teams from academic institutions, global technology companies, and privacy technology companies submitted white papers describing their privacy-preserving data analysis methods. In the second phase, which begins in October 2022, the team begins building the solution they proposed in the white paper. Challenge participants will have the opportunity to work with regulators and government agencies to gain guidance on developing solutions that support key regulatory principles.
In the United States, awards were presented to the following teams:
- Team MusCAT – Researchers from the Broad Institute, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard Business School, University of Texas at Austin, University of Toronto
- IBM research team
- Team Secret Computers – Researchers from Inpher Inc.
In the UK, awards were given to the following organisations:
- Raven Research Ltd
- diagonal works
- GMV
- college
- Featured Space Ltd
- OpenMined and DeepMind
- puvida co., ltd.
- University of Cambridge
- University of Liverpool
In the third phase of the prize-winning challenge, the “red team” will launch privacy attacks on the most potential solutions, strictly test their privacy protection capabilities, and select the final winners. Red team applications will be accepted until November. February 23, 2022. The red team with the highest score will be awarded from a total prize pool of US$225,000 (£200,000).
Solutions for the financial crime and public health tracks are being developed using synthetic datasets representing real-world use cases. Prize challenge organizers announced today that the synthetic banking data used in the financial crime challenge is based on data from global financial institutions BNY Mellon and Deutsche Bank.
The innovator in financial crime is also using synthetic global transaction data created by SWIFT, a global provider of secure financial messaging services, powered by MOSTLY AI. Innovators in public health are using a synthetic dataset created by the University of Virginia’s Biocomplexity Institute.
Planning to address the challenge is led by the UK Center for Data Ethics and Innovation and Innovate UK, the US White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, NIST and NSF.
The prize challenge starts in July 2022. For more information, visit petsprizechallenges.com.
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