Engineer Position on Fairness and Privacy in Trustworthy Machine Learning (F/M)

Engineer Position on Fairness and Privacy in Trustworthy Machine Learning (F/M)

Created in 2008, the Inria center at the University of Lille employs 360 people, including 305 scientists in 16 research teams.

Recognized for its strong involvement in the socio-economic development of the Hauts-De-France region, the Inria center at the University of Lille maintains a close relationship with large companies and SMEs.

By fostering synergies between researchers and industry, Inria contributes to the transfer of skills and expertise in the field of digital technologies, and provides access to the best of European and international research for the benefit of innovation and businesses, particularly in the region.

For over 10 years, the Inria center at the University of Lille has been at the heart of Lille's university and scientific ecosystem, as well as at the heart of Frenchtech, with a technology showroom based on avenue de Bretagne in Lille, on the Eura Technologies site of economic excellence dedicated to information and communication technologies (ICT).

The selected candidate will be based in Lille in the MAGNET team .

The main objective of the team is to develop ethically acceptable machine learning algorithms focusing on fairness, privacy, and decentralized learning and to empower end users of artificial intelligence.

The candidate will be under the supervision of Michaël Perrot.

Machine learning is nowadays used in various applications, such as medical diagnosis and speech recognition.

Its success stems from the performance of learned models, sometimes reaching human-level capabilities.

However, deploying these models on a larger scale requires more than just accuracy, and it is imperative to consider fairness and privacy when human lives are affected.

For instance, a model used for medical diagnosis or an automated hiring process should not be biased against subgroups of the population.

Similarly, released models should not leak information about the data that was used to train them.

Several approaches have been proposed in the literature to enforce fairness and privacy (either individually or jointly) in machine learning models.

The goal of this engineer position will be to make fairness and privacy preserving approaches developed in the team more accessible to the machine learning community.

On the one hand, the Fair Grad library was developed a few years ago as an easy to use approach to enforce fairness.

A first objective will thus be to expand it, benchmark it, and integrate it to existing fairness libraries (such as AIF360 and Fairlearn ) as well as general purpose machine learning libraries (such as scikit-learn ).

On the other hand, recent work in the team showed that it is possible to learn from locally private data with a controlled bias [1].

A second goal will thus be to propose an efficient implementation of the proposed approach and to benchmark it on a variety of tasks.

Finally, a third objective will be to integrate both methods with each other to propose a well founded pipeline to learn privacy preserving and fair machine learning models.

• Review and follow the existing libraries on Fair and Privacy preserving Machine Learning.
• Maintain, benchmark and expand the scope of the Fair Grad library.
• Implement, maintain, and benchmark a machine learning pipeline for machine learning from locally private data.

A good candidate will have the following skills

• A good command of English
• A good command of Python
• A strong background in implementation and experimentation
• A strong background in mathematics
• A good knowledge of machine learning, statistics and algorithms
• Some knowledge on fairness and/or privacy would be a plus
• 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
• Collaborate in the team and where applicable with external researchers and engineers
• Organize work efficiently and make a good balance between the several priorities
• Report regularly
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