Federated learning is a machine learning method that supports training models on decentralized devices or servers, where each holds its local data, removing the need for data exchange. This approach is especially useful in healthcare, as it enables training on sensitive data without needing to share them. The nature of federated learning necessitates robust security precautions due to data leakage concerns during communication. To address this issue, we propose a new approach that employs selective encryption, homomorphic encryption, differential privacy, and bit-wise scrambling to minimize data leakage while achieving good execution performance. Our technique , FAS (fast and secure federated learning) is used to train deep learning models on medical imaging data. We implemented our technique using the Flower framework and compared with a state-of-the-art federated learning approach that also uses selective homomorphic encryption. Our experiments were run in a cluster of eleven physical machines to create a real-world federated learning scenario on different datasets. We observed that our approach is up to 90\% faster than applying fully homomorphic encryption on the model weights. In addition, we can avoid the pretraining step that is required by our competitor and can save up to 20\% in terms of total execution time. While our approach was faster, it obtained similar security results as the competitor.

Large language models have gained tremendous popularity in domains such as e-commerce, finance, healthcare, and education. Fine-tuning is a common approach to customize an LLM on a domain-specific dataset for a desired downstream task. In this paper, we present a valuable resource for fine-tuning LLMs developed for the Spanish language to perform a variety of tasks such as classification, masked language modeling, clustering, and others. Our resource is a collection of handwritten notary records from the seventeenth century obtained from the National Archives of Argentina. This collection contains a combination of original images and transcribed text (and metadata) of 160+ pages that were handwritten by two notaries, namely, Estenban Agreda de Vergara and Nicolas de Valdivia y Brisuela nearly 400 years ago. Through empirical evaluation, we demonstrate that our collection can be used to fine-tune Spanish LLMs for tasks such as classification and masked language modeling, and can outperform pre-trained Spanish models and ChatGPT-3.5/ChatGPT-4o. Our resource will be an invaluable resource for historical text analysis and is publicly available on GitHub.

Real-world knowledge can be represented as a graph consisting of entities and relationships between the entities. The need for efficient and scalable solutions arises when dealing with vast genomic data, like RNA-sequencing. Knowledge graphs offer a powerful approach for various tasks in such large-scale genomic data, such as analysis and inference. In this work, variant-level information extracted from the RNA-sequences of vaccine-na\"ive COVID-19 patients have been represented as a unified, large knowledge graph. Variant call format (VCF) files containing the variant-level information were annotated to include further information for each variant. The data records in the annotated files were then converted to Resource Description Framework (RDF) triples. Each VCF file obtained had an associated CADD scores file that contained the raw and Phred-scaled scores for each variant. An ontology was defined for the VCF and CADD scores files. Using this ontology and the extracted information, a large, scalable knowledge graph was created. Available graph storage was then leveraged to query and create datasets for further downstream tasks. We also present a case study using the knowledge graph and perform a classification task using graph machine learning. We also draw comparisons between different Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) for the case study.

In this paper, we focus on the problem of learning a Bayesian network over distributed data stored in a commodity cluster. Specifically, we address the challenge of computing the scoring function over distributed data in a scalable manner, which is a fundamental task during learning. We propose a novel approach designed to achieve: (a) scalable score computation using the principle of gossiping; (b) lower resource consumption via a probabilistic approach for maintaining scores using the properties of a Markov chain; and (c) effective distribution of tasks during score computation (on large datasets) by synergistically combining well-known hashing techniques. Through theoretical analysis, we show that our approach is superior to a MapReduce-style computation in terms of communication bandwidth. Further, it is superior to the batch-style processing of MapReduce for recomputing scores when new data are available.