Title: Towards Personalized Federated Learning

Abstract: To enable federated learning technologies to make significant positive real-world impact, one the most pressing challenges it needs to address to how to deal with various heterogeneity issues inherent in practical collaborative machine learning. Such heterogeneities can be manifested as data distribution heterogeneity, device heterogeneity, and model heterogeneity. In this talk, I will provide an overview of the field of personalized federated learning which aims to address the heterogeneity issues facing federated learning. I will provide an interdisciplinary perspective on this topic, discussing its interactions with other dimensions of trustworthy machine learning including explainability, fairness, and efficiency, highlighting interesting cutting-edge collaborative research work in these areas between the TrustFUL Lab in NTU and the TEA Lab in UBC. Towards the end of the talk, I will also share some useful resources that can support interdisciplinary investigations in other promising areas of federated learning, as well as collaboration opportunities through workshops to be held in leading conferences in the field.

Bio: Dr Han Yu is a Nanyang Assistant Professor (NAP) in the School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore since 2018. Between 2015 and 2018, he held the prestigious Lee Kuan Yew Post-Doctoral Fellowship. He obtained his PhD from the School of Computer Science and Engineering, NTU in 2014. His work focuses on trustworthy federated learning. He has published over 250 research papers in leading international conferences (e.g., AAAI, IJCAI, NeurIPS, AAMAS) and journals (e.g., TNNLS), and received multiple scientific accolades. In 2021, he co-founded the Trustworthy Federated Ubiquitous Learning (TrustFUL) Research Lab. He is a Distinguished Member of CCF, and a Senior Member of AAAI and IEEE. For his continued contributions to the field of trustworthy AI and real-world impact, he has been selected as one of the JCI Ten Outstanding Young Persons of Singapore in 2022.