On June 24th, the famous international non-profit organization Linux Foundation holds KubeCon + CloudNativeCon + Open Source Summit in Shanghai. At the summit the Foundation announces that WeBank has become the latest gold member of the Linux Foundation, and WeBank is the first finial institution that acquires the gold membership. Meanwhile, WeBank also announces that it will contribute to the Linux Foundation the Federated AI Technology Enabler (FATE), an independently researched and developed project by WeBank.
Federated AI Technology Enabler (FATE) is the world’s first industrial-level Federated Learning framework, launched by WeBank’s AI team in February this year. It enables companies and institutions to cooperate in developing AI products on the premise of protecting data security and information privacy.
Breaking data monopoly, AI practitioners now face the challenge to preserve data security when using data from difference sources. “Federated Learning” will become the key technology to solve this industry-wide problem. The advantage of Federated Learning is that it can ensure data independence while multiple parties build machine learning models together. During model building, all parties grow models without compromising user privacy or data security.
Currently China is a leading advocate in the research and application of Federated Learning. WeBank pioneers the development of Federated Learning technology in China. International artificial intelligence expert and Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer (CAIO) of WeBank, Professor Qiang Yang first proposed “federal migration learning”. Moreover, by leading the development of the international standard (IEEE) for Federated Learning and the open-source project FATE, WeBank’s AI team promotes application of Federated Learning technology in the industry.
Professor Yang commented that the Linux Foundation is an important representative of global open-source organizations; close cooperation with Linux Foundation is an important step for WeBank to enter the open-source community. “We will make full use of the foundation’s expertise in open-source management, laws and regulations, event organization, marketing and other fields. As a gold member, we will fulfill our commitment, further provide resources and support for the open source community. We will continue to serve the community and give back to the entire industry through open-sourcing our technical achievements.”
As the world’s first industrial-scale Federated Learning technology framework, FATE project includes federated learning models out-of-the-box, such as LR, GBDT, DNN, etc. More importantly, it provides developers with a template for implementing Federated Learning algorithms and systems, most of which can be adapted to the Federated Learning framework. Additionally, FATE provides a set of friendly cross-domain interactive information management scheme, which offers means to audit about Federated Learning information security. Currently, the AI team of WeBank has applied FATE to a series of applications such as credit risk control, customer equity pricing, regulatory technology and so on. (FATE project address： https://github.com/WeBankFinTech/FATE)
The development of global artificial intelligence has entered a new stage, showing features such as cross-border integration and open-group intelligence. By contributing its open-source project FATE, WeBank demonstrates a good enterprise model for domestic and foreign open-source undertakings. Meanwhile, FATE, a new source of advanced artificial intelligence technology for developers, serves for the industry as a solution to data silos and data privacy. This will be a win-win move for consumers, developers, and data owners.