Communication-Efficient Optimization Methods for Federated Learning
Gauri Joshi
Assistant Professor
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Carnegie Melon University
Host: Cong Shen
Time and Location: Friday, October 23, 2020 2:00pm
Registration link: https://virginia.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUuc-qopj8pHddomH0WSr36Uv65-ckxd2mB
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 locally perform a few iterations of training and only send the resulting model to the cloud. In this talk, I will present our recent work on federated optimization algorithms that are system-aware (robust to communication limitations and computation variabilities) and data-aware (can handle heterogeneity in the size and distribution of the training data).
Biography: 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 ACM Sigmetrics Best Paper Award (2020), NSF CRII Award (2018), IBM Faculty Research Award (2017), Best Thesis Prize in Computer science at MIT (2012), Institute Gold Medal of IIT Bombay (2010), and the Claude Shannon Research Assistantship (2015-16).