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Facebook wants AI researchers to figure out privacy

The company will pay for 5,000 people to learn about "secure and private" artificial intelligence because, as its CEO says, "The future is private."

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Stephen Shankland principal writer
Stephen Shankland has been a reporter at CNET since 1998 and writes about processors, digital photography, AI, quantum computing, computer science, materials science, supercomputers, drones, browsers, 3D printing, USB, and new computing technology in general. He has a soft spot in his heart for standards groups and I/O interfaces. His first big scoop was about radioactive cat poop.
Expertise processors, semiconductors, web browsers, quantum computing, supercomputers, AI, 3D printing, drones, computer science, physics, programming, materials science, USB, UWB, Android, digital photography, science Credentials
  • I've been covering the technology industry for 24 years and was a science writer for five years before that. I've got deep expertise in microprocessors, digital photography, computer hardware and software, internet standards, web technology, and other dee
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Stephen Shankland
2 min read
Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, California

Facebook is based in Menlo Park, California

 Stephen Shankland/CNET

Facebook is working with online learning site Udacity to try to enable AI research that doesn't hurt privacy.

At the social network's F8 conference on Wednesday, Facebook announced that it's offering scholarships to 5,000 people to take a new Udacity course called Secure and Private AI. This is the second phase of a Facebook program to help 300 people earn a Udacity "nanodegree." The idea is to learn to apply techniques that AI powers are using like differential privacy at Apple and federated learning at Google.

Facebook  is itself an AI giant, broadly applying the technology called deep learning and employing AI pioneer Yann LeCun, one of three recent winners of the prestigious Turing Prize.

But when it comes to  privacy , Facebook has a lot of work to do after mishandling sensitive data, the Cambridge Analytica scandal and a business that profits from knowing all about its 2.38 billion monthly users.

"I know that we don't exactly have the strongest reputation on privacy right now," Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said Tuesday at the first day of F8 in San Jose, California. Still, the company's new mantra is "The future is private."

The Udacity course -- a sequel to one on Facebook's PyTorch AI tool that attracted 18,000 students -- dovetails with that privacy focus.

"Without data scientists who know how to properly preserve privacy, private data is either left unused -- a critical loss in fields such as health care -- or is put at risk through data science techniques which lack the proper privacy protections," said Andrew Trask, a research scientist at Google-owned AI firm DeepMind and leader of private machine learning software project OpenMined. He helped design the course.