WASHINGTON - Today the United Kingdom and the United States governments have announced the 12 winners of the first phase of the U.K.-U.S. privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) prize challenges. Competing for cash prizes from a combined U.S.-U.K. prize pool of $1.6 million (£1.3 million), participants are developing solutions that will enable artificial intelligence models to be trained on sensitive data without organizations having to reveal, share or combine their raw data.
Winning challenge solutions will be showcased at the second Summit for Democracy, which President Joe Biden plans to convene in the first half of 2023. The U.S. challenge is funded and administered by the U.S. Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF).
"AI is driving rapid technology change that is based on ever-increasing amounts of disparate data, making privacy-enhancing technologies increasingly important," said Under Secretary of Commerce for Standards and Technology and NIST Director Laurie E. Locascio. "The U.S.-U.K. PET prize challenge provides a global venue to build and showcase cutting-edge and scalable solutions that respect human rights and civil liberties. I am excited by the solutions proposed by these scholars and look forward to their impact on enhancing privacy and bolstering trustworthy AI."
"These first-of-their-kind international prize challenges are focusing innovators from the U.S. and U.K. on overcoming the challenge of maturing PETs for practical use cases," said National Science Foundation Director Sethuraman Panchanathan. "The level of participation and caliber of participants in the U.S.-U.K. PETs prize challenges promise to accelerate the translation of PETs to practice. I'm excited to see the strong start to the prize challenges across the transatlantic research community and look forward to the results in the next phases."
The 12 prize-winning technical papers were selected from 76 entries across two challenge tracks: using PETs to improve detection of financial crime and forecasting an individual's risk of infection during a pandemic, or designing a solution that would meet both scenarios. A total of $157,000 (£138,000) was awarded in this phase.
