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

WeBank to contribute the Federated AI Enabler framework to the Linux Foundation and establish neutral community to oversee development

Shanghai – June 25, 2019 – KubeCon + CloudNativeCon – 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

SUPPORTING QUOTES

The 4Paradigm
“The donation of FATE to Linux Foundation is a great leap towards to the popularization and general use of the FML and start the new era of fast iteration in FML with the strong support from Linux Foundation community,” said Yuqiang Chen, Co-founder and Chief Research Scientist, The 4Paradigm Inc.

CETC Big Data Research Institute
“For the current issues of “small data” and “data silos” that exist in most application scenarios, FATE, as an industrial-level federated learning framework, provides a comprehensive solution to solve these issues,” said Dr. Xu Cheng, the deputy director of General Technical Research Centre, CETC Big Data Research Institute Co. Ltd. “It can meet the requirement of data joint modeling and usage in the condition of satisfying security compliance, and further, expand and deepen the sharing and openness of government data.”

Clustar
“FATE offers the whole community a security computation tool to link the isolated data islands without violating data privacy,” said Prof. Kai Chen, Founder of Beijing Clustar Technology Ltd. “It makes use of homomorphic encryption to support various security federated learning algorithms like LR, Decision Tree, and deep learning. More importantly, FATE employs transfer learning to combine heterogeneous data with different feature spaces in a practical way.”

JD Intelligent Cities Research
“FATE is highly flexible for various federated modeling scenarios and can be easily deployed. The FATE framework also lowers the difficulty of FML prototyping and researchers can quickly design their own methods based on it,” said Dr. Junbo Zhang, Senior Researcher at JD Intelligent Cities Research. “Both the academic and industry are benefiting from the hard work of WeBank, and without them, the FML community could not be developing so fast.”

Squirrel AI Learning
“With the open platform of the Linux Foundation, we hope that more people will join in the development of the FATE project,” said Dr. Wei Cui, Chief Scientist of Squirrel AI Learning by Yixue Group.

Tencent
“As a pioneer in the federated learning field, a series of practices have been carried out in the financial field by the FATE team,” said Junyan Wu, Director of Tencent WSPD (Wireless Security Product Department). “In the future, we hope the FATE project could work with Linux Foundation to create a complete and fruitful federated AI ecosystem for all machine learning practitioners.”

About WeBank
Founded in 2014, WeBank is both the first privately-owned bank and the first digital-only bank in China. WeBank was built with technology at its core, and with technology as a key driver behind the bank’s development. As such, WeBank is committed to promoting innovative technologies. Since its formal launch, WeBank has already completed the construction of a comprehensive banking platform with self-owned intellectual properties, capable of handling high-volume, high-frequency transactions. WeBank is also the very first commercial bank to be recognized as a National High-tech Enterprise by the Ministry of Science and Technology of China. WeBank strongly embraces the oft-stated ‘ABCD’ technologies (A.I., Blockchain, Cloud Computing, Big Data) as its strategic focuses and is an active leader in their related researches and applications in the financial sector. For more information, please visit us at https://www.webank.com

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.

###

The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see its trademark usage page: www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.