OpenMined Featured Contributor: April 2021

Where are you based?

"San Diego, CA, USA"

What do you do?

"I’m a 3rd year CS Phd student at UC San Diego"

What are your specialties?

"Research,  PyTorch Development, Event Organization"

How and when did you originally come across OpenMined?

"I think it was December of 2019, or January 2020, I came across it when I was watching a Lecture by Andrew! I really liked the initiative right away! Then a while after I saw Andrew tweet a an application form for research scientists, I filled one right away and was luckily selected ^_^"

What was the first thing you started working on within OpenMined?

"When we launched the research team, each research lead had proposed a project to work on. The project I proposed was on the intersection  of differential privacy and fairness.  I worked with an amazing research engineer, Tom Farrand, and Sahib Singh and Andrew, and we got a publication out of it! I was also working on another project with one of OM’s great researchers, Georgios Kaissis and with the help of the great Teddy Koker and Tom Titcombe. We have also submitted a paper on that."

And what are you working on now?

"Right now, I have the pleasure of working with another one of OM’s great research engineers, Abinav Ravi where we are working on differentially private language models."

What would you say to someone who wants to start contributing?

"OpenMined is an amazing welcoming community, and joining it was one of the highlights of 2020 for me! I made lots of new friends and had lots of fun in the meetings. I urge people to start helping however they can, and whenever they are feeling lost or confused, just reach out to more senior members and ask for help!"

Please recommend one interesting book, podcast or resource to the OpenMined community.

"I love the book “freakonomics” it offers a fresh look into problems that might seem mundane or simple from the outside."