What's New in Deep Learning Research: Understanding Federated Learning

Last week I published a brief analysis of the OpenMined platform as one of the new technologies that is trying to enable truly decentralized artificial intelligence(AI) processes by leveraging blockchain technologies. In the article, I mentioned that OpenMined drew parts of its inspiration from Google's research about federated learning as a mechanism to improve on the traditional centralized approach to train AI models. From my perspective, I consider federated learning is one of the most interesting AI research breakthroughs of the last two years that is already powering mission critical applications. The idea behind federated learning is as conceptually simple as it its technologically complex. Traditional machine learning programs relied on a centralized model for training in which a group of servers run a specific model against training and validation datasets.