Intel, Microsoft, and Duality Technologies recently convened for the fourth Homomorphic Encryption Standardization Workshop at Intel’s campus in Santa Clara, California. The workshop – which took place on August 17th – was organized in an effort to set industry standards for homomorphic encryption (HE), which is being used to ensure privacy in modern AI tech.
“The Workshop will accelerate the standardization process and decrease the time to commercial availability of this important privacy protection tool,” said Kristin Lautner, a partner research manager with Microsoft’s Cryptography and Privacy Research Group.
At its core, HE technology allows organizations to use encrypted data to carry out AI computations. Since those organizations don’t need to decrypt the data before using it, HE ensures the privacy of sensitive information like medical or financial records while still facilitating machine learning.
The workshop was geared towards AI researchers, app developers, and security experts, and detailed potential use cases and a review of the latest research. The conclusions will be available online for those who were not amongst the approximately 100 attendees.
The workshop is one of several Microsoft initiatives created in an effort to ensure people’s privacy. The company recently previewed a blockchain-based decentralized identity platform, and has collaborated with Mastercard on a similar identity service. The latest workshop indicates that businesses are beginning to make customer data a priority, taking a stance that is more in line with the new GDPR regulations.
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