Facebook wants AI researchers to figure out privacy
The company will pay for 5,000 people to learn about "secure and private" artificial intelligence because, as its CEO says, "The future is private."
- Shankland covered the tech industry for more than 25 years and was a science writer for five years before that. He has deep expertise in microprocessors, digital photography, computer hardware and software, internet standards, web technology, and more.
Facebook is based in Menlo Park, California
Facebook is working with online learning site Udacity to try to enable AI research that doesn't hurt privacy.
At the social network's F8 conference on Wednesday, Facebook announced that it's offering scholarships to 5,000 people to take a new Udacity course called Secure and Private AI. This is the second phase of a Facebook program to help 300 people earn a Udacity "nanodegree." The idea is to learn to apply techniques that AI powers are using like differential privacy at Apple and federated learning at Google.
Facebook is itself an AI giant, broadly applying the technology called deep learning and employing AI pioneer Yann LeCun, one of three recent winners of the prestigious Turing Prize.
But when it comes to privacy , Facebook has a lot of work to do after mishandling sensitive data, the Cambridge Analytica scandal and a business that profits from knowing all about its 2.38 billion monthly users.
"I know that we don't exactly have the strongest reputation on privacy right now," Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said Tuesday at the first day of F8 in San Jose, California. Still, the company's new mantra is "The future is private."
The Udacity course -- a sequel to one on Facebook's PyTorch AI tool that attracted 18,000 students -- dovetails with that privacy focus.
"Without data scientists who know how to properly preserve privacy, private data is either left unused -- a critical loss in fields such as health care -- or is put at risk through data science techniques which lack the proper privacy protections," said Andrew Trask, a research scientist at Google-owned AI firm DeepMind and leader of private machine learning software project OpenMined. He helped design the course.