In this interview series, we're meeting some of the AAAI/SIGAI Doctoral Consortium participants to find out more about their research. We sat down with Abdelrahman Sayed Sayed to chat about his work on formal verification applied to autonomous vehicles. Could you tell us a bit about where you're studying and the broad topic of your research? My PhD topic is formal verification of neural ODE (ordinary differential equations) for safety evaluation in autonomous vehicles. Could you say something about formal verification and why it's such an important topic?

Existing methods employ the influence function to achieve feature unlearning, which is impractical for FL as it necessitates the participation of other clients,if not all, in the unlearning process. Furthermore, current research lacks an evaluation of the effectiveness of feature unlearning. Toaddress these limitations, we define feature sensitivity in evaluating feature unlearning according to Lipschitz continuity. Thismetric characterizes themodel output'srateofchange or sensitivity to perturbations in the input feature. We then propose an effective federated feature unlearning framework called Ferrari, which minimizes feature sensitivity. Extensive experimental results and theoretical analysis demonstrate the effectiveness of Ferrari across various feature unlearning scenarios, including sensitive, backdoor, and biased features.

Privacy-protected microdata are often the desired output of a differentially private algorithm since microdata isfamiliar and convenient for downstream users. However, there is a statistical price for this kind of convenience.

Figure 1: Illustration of the proposed visual programming frameworks for text-to-image (T2I) generation and evaluation.