Gauri Joshi: Tackling Computational Heterogeneity in Federated Learning

This talk was held on April 7, 2022 as a part of the MLFL series, hosted by the Center for Data Science, UMass Amherst.

Abstract: The future of machine learning lies in moving both data collection as well as model training to the edge. The emerging area of federated learning seeks to achieve this goal by orchestrating distributed model training using a large number of resource-constrained mobile devices that collect data from their environment. Due to limited communication capabilities as well as privacy concerns, the data collected by these devices cannot be sent to the cloud for centralized processing. Instead, the nodes perform local training updates and only send the resulting model to the cloud. A key aspect that sets federated learning apart from data-center-based distributed training is the inherent heterogeneity in data and local computation at the edge clients. In this talk, I will present our recent work on tackling computational heterogeneity in federated optimization, firstly in terms of heterogeneous local updates made by the edge clients, and secondly in terms of intermittent client availability.

Bio: Gauri Joshi is an assistant professor in the ECE department at Carnegie Mellon University since September 2017. Previously, she worked as a Research Staff Member at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. Gauri completed her Ph.D. from MIT EECS in June 2016, advised by Prof. Gregory Wornell. She received her B.Tech and M.Tech in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay in 2010. Her awards and honors include the NSF CAREER Award (2021), ACM Sigmetrics Best Paper Award (2020), NSF CRII Award (2018), IBM Faculty Research Award (2017), Best Thesis Prize in Computer science at MIT (2012), and Institute Gold Medal of IIT Bombay (2010).

About Machine Learning and Friends Lunch: MLFL is a lively and interactive forum held weekly where friends of the UMass Amherst machine learning community can sit down, have lunch, and give or hear a 50-minute presentation on recent machine learning research. This semester of the UMass MLFL series has been graciously sponsored by our friends at Oracle Labs.

Please follow this link to know more about the past and upcoming talks: http://umass-mlfl.github.io