Meet OpenMined's new UCSF-OpenMined Fellows

Patrick Cason -

We’re very excited to announce the recipients of the latest round of open-source software development grants in the OpenMined community, generously sponsored by the UCSF team! Congratulations to Héricles Emanuel, José Benardi de Souza Nunes, Amr Kayid, and Sachin Kumar!

Thank you to everyone who applied - we had a huge number of fantastic applicants! You made selecting the final recipients a very tough decision. We hope you'll apply again in the future, and keep in mind that you are still welcome to get involved with the codebases and projects.

Interested in receiving a grant in the future? We are strongly biased toward awarding development grants to individuals who are already contributing to the codebase. The best way to receive one of our grants in the future is to join these great folks in development today!

If you or someone you know may be interested in sponsoring a grant like this one, please don't hesitate to reach out via email - partnerships@openmined.org.

If you're interested in getting involved contact @cereallarceny about the federated learning project.

OpenMined-UCSF Project for Data-Centric Federated Learning

This project will largely be focused on the follow improvements, changes, and additions to the PyGrid project:

  • Adding cloud deployment and scaling to PyGrid for major cloud providers
  • Adding differential privacy budgeting capabilities to PyGrid to allow Grid owners the ability to measure privacy leakage from private datasets
  • Adding a user and tensor permissioning system to PyGrid to allow for more detailed access control to private data
  • Creating a UI, called the "PyGrid Admin UI", that will serve as the control panel for all PyGrid functionality

Héricles Emanuel

Héricles is a software developer based in Campina Grande, Brazil currently pursuing his bachelor's degree in Computer Science at the Federal University of Campina Grande. He has worked on the development of interfaces for secure cloud applications and on initiatives to improve confidence in applications that handle sensitive data. He's an open-source enthusiast interested in distributed systems, cloud computing, internet privacy, and AI. While currently a member of the PyGrid team, he is also experimenting on trusted execution environments using Intel SGX.

José Benardi de Souza Nunes

Benardi is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Computer Science at Federal University of Campina Grande with focus in secure computation for machine learning. He acquired his bachelor's degree in Computer Science at the same university. His interests include differential privacy, recommender systems, data analysis, AI, Linux and Git. He’s currently working as a Release Manager and code maintainer on the PyGrid team.

Amr Kayid

Amr is a senior Computer Science and Engineering student at the German University in Cairo, Egypt. He is a Research Engineer at OpenMined working on advanced federated learning, multimodal, and multitask learning. He is also a machine learning researcher with FOR.ai Research Group doing research on advanced A.I. topics including self-driving cars, curriculum learning, and reinforcement learning. Amr was a visiting student at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) where he worked on his bachelor project, associated with the Human Brain Project Organization. He enjoys joining hackathons, attending AI events and working on challenging problems.

Sachin Kumar

Sachin is a student pursuing a Bachelor's degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering with a minor degree in Computer Science at NIT Trichy, India. He is a member of the SyferText team at OpenMined, with a technical focus on natural language processing and automatic speech recognition. He joined the OpenMined community via Google Summer of Code, and has since contributed to multiple OpenMined projects. Apart from machine learning, Sachin is also experienced in developing Android applications.

Congratulations Héricles, Benardi, Amr, and Sachin!

A final note: anyone may apply for an OpenMined fellowship, however, we will show a strong preference to existing contributors - in fact, all people chosen for this grant have each been contributing to OpenMined regularly for at least the past few months. If you would like to better your chances of receiving a grant, we suggest you pick a few issues labeled “good first issue” on any of our code repositories (and of course, Join the Slack):

  • PySyft - the main Syft library for federated and privacy-preserving machine learning
  • PyGrid - the main Grid library for hosting PySyft in a cloud environment
  • Syft.js - the Syft worker for the web
  • KotlinSyft - the Syft library for Android
  • SwiftSyft - the Syft library for iOS
  • SyferText - a privacy-preserving NLP library based on PySyft
  • PyDP - a library for differential privacy written in Python
  • PSI - a library for private set intersection written in Python
  • All other OpenMined repos and projects...