Assoc Prof Reza Shokri clinches Intel’s Outstanding Researcher Award

Associate Professor Reza Shokri, Dean’s Chair Associate Professor at NUS School of Computing, has been conferred the 2023 Intel Outstanding Researcher Award for his research on “Robust and Privacy-Preserving Knowledge Transfer for Heterogeneous Decentralised Learning”. He was among 15 leading academic researchers to receive this award.

The annual award programme recognises the exceptional contributions made through Intel university-sponsored research that help create world-changing technology that improves the lives of everyone on the planet.

Assoc Prof Shokri’s research focuses on data privacy and trustworthy machine learning. In the Intel-supported project, the research team led by Assoc Prof Shokri designed and implemented privacy attacks as well as a system for privacy auditing of machine learning models. Their open source tool, Privacy Meter, simulates a range of privacy attacks including variants of membership inference to assess the privacy risks of machine learning algorithms. The team extended the Privacy Meter tool to analyse privacy risks of federated learning, and validated the method on Intel's OpenFL federated learning framework.

Assoc Prof Shokri is also an Asian Young Scientist Fellow and an NUS Presidential Young Professor of Computer Science.