DARPA Contracts with Duality Technologies to Develop Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning for COVID-19 Research

Duality Technologies partners with Harvard Medical School and Two Six Labs to accelerate privacy-preserving, collaborative machine learning protected through Homomorphic Encryption. This capability supports research into COVID-19 susceptibility while keeping patient data private and secure. Duality Technologies, a leading provider of Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs), announced that it has contracted with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency(DARPA) to develop a privacy-preserving Machine Learning (ML) capability that can train models on encrypted data from multiple sources. The capabilities developed under the contract will be applied to researching genomic susceptibility to severe COVID-19 symptoms in a manner which preserves individual privacy. The development is based on Homomorphic Encryption (HE), a privacy-enhancing technology that allows multiple parties to analyze encrypted data and gain insights without exposing Personally Identifiable Information (PII).