Post-Doctoral Research Visit F/M federate learning and multi-party computation techniques for prostate cancer

The Inria Lille - Nord Europe Research Centre was founded in 2008 and employs a staff of 320, including 280 scientists working in fourteen research teams. Recognised for its outstanding contribution to the socio-economic development of the Hauts-De-France région, the Inria Lille - Nord Europe Research Centre undertakes research in the field of computer science in collaboration with a range of academic, institutional and industrial partners.

 The strategy of the Centre is to develop an internationally renowned centre of excellence with a significant impact on the City of Lille and its surrounding area. It works to achieve this by pursuing a range of ambitious research projects in such fields of computer science as the intelligence of data and adaptive software systems. Building on the synergies between research and industry, Inria is a major contributor to skills and technology transfer in the field of computer science.

This post-doctoral position will be supported by the HE Flute project.   While this position will be in the MAGNET team in Lille, we will collaborate with the several European project partners.

While AI techniques are becoming ever more powerful, there is a growing concern about potential risks and abuses. As a result, there has been an increasing interest in research directions such as privacy-preserving machine learning, explainable machine learning, fairness and data protection legislation.
Privacy-preserving machine learning aims at learning (and publishing or applying) a model from data while the data is not revealed. Notions such as (local) differential privacy and its generalizations allow to bound the amount of information revealed.

The goal of the multi-disciplinary FLUTE project is to advance and scale up data-driven healthcare by developing novel methods for privacy-preserving cross-border utilization of data hubs. Advanced research will be performed to push the performance envelope of secure multi-party computation in Federated Learning, including the associated AI models and secure execution environments.

The INRIA MAGNET team (and hence the recruited collaborators) will contribute to this project among others by researching machine learning algorithms and multi-party protocols with improved scalability in the context of medical data, e.g., by exploiting data sparsity.   This research will involve both theoretical and more applied components.  As coordinator INRIA will also contribute to the integration of the software developed in the FLUTE project (and the complementary FLUTE project).

The start and end date of the offered post-doctoral positions can be negotiated, subject to the administrative constraints that they start at the earliest on 1/1/2023 and end before or around 31/12/2025 and that individual contracts last no longer than 2 years. 

The recruited post-doc will collaborate with colleagues in the MAGNET team and the FLUTE project consortium in general.

If the research features a prototype, it will contribute to the project's open source library.

We hope the post-doc can bring new expertise to the group and/or can help intensifying collaboration in the project consortium.  He will collaborate closely with the other group members on realizing the research objectives of the project.  Engineers in the team can support the prototyping and validation.

Possible topics of research include (but are not limited to):

• Cryptography-based strategies to improve the security of privacy-preserving AI systems.
• Inference methods for privacy assessment
• Design and development of the FLUTE platform and its supporting algorithms

• Contribute to the research of the FLUTE project
• Collaborate with other MAGNET and FLUTE team members
• Collaborate with engineers to prototype proposed algorithms and validate them
• Disseminate research results

The following skills are desired for this position:

• a strong research background in the domain of the project (or at least a specific area such as privacy, cryptography, statistics, distributed systems, ...)
• good communication and reporting skills, and an interest in collaborative work
• proficiency in English

• Subsidized meals
• Partial reimbursement of public transport costs
• Leave: 7 weeks of annual leave + 10 extra days off due to RTT (statutory reduction in working hours) + possibility of exceptional leave (sick children, moving home, etc.)
• Possibility of teleworking and flexible organization of working hours
• Professional equipment available (videoconferencing, loan of computer equipment, etc.)
• Social, cultural and sports events and activities
• Access to vocational training
• Social security coverage

Gross monthly salary (before taxes) : 2 746 €