The Private AI Bootcamp offered by Microsoft Research (MSR) focused on tutorials of building privacy-preserving machine learning services and applications with homomorphic encryption (HE). Around 30 PhD students were invited to gather at the Microsoft Research Lab in Redmond on Dec 2nd – 4th, 2019. The program contents were specifically designed for training. Participants mastered the use of HE, the Microsoft SEAL library, and the methodology behind building privacy-preserving machine learning solutions. As a project as well as a competition, students worked in teams, designed and pitched a novel technology built upon what they had learned during the bootcamp, and received feedback and scores from experts. There was a secret prize for the winning team. There were also social events where all participants had a chance to meet and network with other PhD students and experts from MSR.

Wei Dai is a senior research SDE in the Cryptography and Privacy Research group at Microsoft Research. His research interests are cryptography, privacy, and high-performance computing, with a focus on homomorphic encryption and hardware acceleration. He received a PhD degree from Worcester Polytechnic Institute in 2019 and a BS degree from Fudan University in 2012.

See more from Microsoft Research's Private AI Bootcamp: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/resea...