Data matching and entity resolution is a common first step in data preparation and there is a thousand academic papers written on the subject in the literature. In practice, for large datasets – anything more than a million records will do as a definition of large here because most data-matching algorithms can’t handle that because … More A Note on Large Scale Data Matching and Entity Resolution
A few colleagues and I have just put on arXiv a new survey paper on Private Graph Data Release, which took us nearly 9 months to write. Here’s the abstract: The application of graph analytics to various domains have yielded tremendous societal and economical benefits in recent years. However, the increasingly widespread adoption of graph … More Private Graph Data Release using Differential Privacy
One of my PhD students has just released a paper titled Spatially Invariant Unsupervised 3D Object Segmentation Using Graph Neural Networks. Here’s the abstract: In this paper, we tackle the problem of unsupervised 3D object segmentation from a point cloud without RGB information. In particular, we propose a framework, SPAIR3D, to model a point cloud … More Unsupervised 3D Object Segmentation
I am sometimes asked what is the difference between Machine Learning (ML) and X, where X is one of a number of things like Statistics, Evolutionary Computing, Control Theory, etc. A variation of the question is what are problem classes that can be tackled by both ML and non-ML techniques, and what are the pros … More Machine Learning: A Broad Church
My former postdoc Lingjuan Lyu has been working with a few research collaborators on a fair and privacy-preserving federated deep-learning framework and a paper describing the framework has just been published at the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems. Here’s the paper details: Title: Towards Fair and Privacy-Preserving Federated Deep Models Abstract: The current … More Towards Fair and Privacy-Preserving Federated Deep Learning Models
Another day, another paper, this time by my postdoc Lingjuan Lyu and a few collaborators. Here’s the abstract: In privacy-preserving machine learning, individual parties are reluctant to share their sensitive training data due to privacy concerns. Even the trained model parameters or prediction can pose serious privacy leakage. To address these problems, we demonstrate a … More Distributed Privacy-Preserving Prediction
A few ANU colleagues and I have just completed a paper on a suffix-tree-based algorithm for computing the longest common substring of two strings in a privacy-preserving manner. Here’s the abstract: The task of calculating similarities between strings held by different organizations without revealing these strings is an increasingly important problem in areas such as … More Accurate and Efficient Privacy-Preserving String Matching
The Networks scientist Albert-Laszlo Barabasi’s latest book The Formula: The Science Behind Why People Succeed or Fail is a cracker. His six laws of success summarise more than a decade of research into the science of success, in particular how the social network in which we live and operate, with its many kinds of relationships … More The Success Formula
Data Scientists, because of the versatility and range of their skills, can suffer from the paradox of choice when it comes to choosing a career. According to Barry Schwartz, a strategy for good decision-making when there is an abundance of choices will involve these steps, executed in a way that takes careful consideration of all … More What Kind of a Data Scientist Are You?
Apparently, everything that has the word Blockchain attached to it is now news-worthy. Or at least that’s how I think this relatively small R&D collaboration between AUSTRAC and Swinburne University of Technology got a mention a couple of days ago in ZDNet, a pretty respectable technology site that has been around forever. https://www.zdnet.com/article/austrac-trialling-blockchain-to-automate-funds-transfer-instructions/ Coding the … More Legislation as Code
Combating terrorist financing
My Irrational Life
Updates on my research and expository papers, discussion of open problems, and other maths-related topics. By Terence Tao
Mental Models 4 Life 