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Post-Doctoral Research Visit F/M Trustworthy multi-site privacy-preserving technologies

Job offer in pdf format

Contract type : Fixed-term contract

Level of qualifications required : PhD or equivalent

Fonction : Post-Doctoral Research Visit

Level of experience : Up to 3 years

About the research centre or Inria department

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.

Context

This post-doctoral position will be supported by the HE Trumpet 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 overall goal of the TRUMPET project is to research and develop novel privacy enhancement methods for Federated Learning, and to deliver a highly scalable Federated AI service platform for researchers, that will enable AI-powered studies of siloed, multi-site, cross-domain, cross-border European datasets with privacy guarantees that exceed the requirements of GDPR. 

INRIA's MAGNET team will contribute among others to tasks involving AI algorithms and architectures, federated Learning, privacy platforms, privacy measurement and metrics, privacy-enhancing technologies and applied cryptography

 

Assignment

The recruited post-doc will collaborate with colleagues in the MAGNET team and the TRUMPET 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 TRUMPET platform and its supporting algorithms

 

Main activities

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

 

Skills

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

Benefits package

  • 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

Remuneration

Gross monthly salary (before taxes) : 2 653 €