Stanford MLSys Seminar Episode 48: Mosharaf Chowdhury [Th, 1.35-2.30pm PT]

[Karan Goel]

Hi everyone,

We're back with the forty-eighth episode of the MLSys Seminar on Thursday from 1.35-2.30pm PT. 

We'll be joined by Mosharaf Chowdhury, who will talk about developing open-source systems for federated learning. The format is a 30 minute talk followed by a 30 minute podcast-style discussion, where the live audience can ask questions.

Livestream Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcbOMbg4F9g

Guests: Mosharaf Chowdhury

Title: Systems Support for Federated Computation

Abstract: Although theoretical federated learning research is growing exponentially, we are far from putting those theories into practice. In this talk, I will share our ventures into building practical systems for two extremities of federated learning. Sol is a cross-silo federated learning and analytics system that tackles network latency and bandwidth challenges faced by distributed computation between far-apart data sites. Oort, in contrast, is a cross-device federated learning system that enables training and testing on representative data distributions despite unpredictable device availability. Both deal with systems and network characteristics in the wild that are hard to account for in analytical models. I'll then share the challenges in systematically evaluating federated learning systems that have led to a disconnect between theoretical conclusions and performance in the wild. I'll conclude this talk by introducing FedScale, which is an extensible framework for evaluation and benchmarking in realistic settings to democratize practical federated learning for researchers and practitioners alike. All these systems are open-source and available at https://github.com/symbioticlab.
Bio: Mosharaf Chowdhury is a Morris Wellman assistant professor of CSE at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he leads the SymbioticLab. His recent research is on application-infrastructure co-design for federated learning, resource disaggregation, and systems for AI and Big Data. In the past, Mosharaf invented coflows and was a co-creator of Apache Spark. Artifacts from his research are widely used in cloud datacenters. He has received many individual honors and awards as well as best-of-conference awards thanks to his amazing students and collaborators. He received his Ph.D. from the AMPLab at UC Berkeley in 2015.

See you all there!

Best,

Karan

[Karan Goel]

Reminder: this is in 20 minutes!