"Winners Announced in First Phase of UK-US Privacy-Enhancing Technologies Prize Challenges"
The winners of the first phase of the US-UK Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs) prize challenges have been announced by the UK and US governments. Innovators are taking part in two challenge tracks: using PETs to improve the detection of financial crime and forecasting an individual's risk of infection during a pandemic, or designing a solution that meets both scenarios. The 12 prize-winning technical papers, chosen from 76 submissions, presented cutting-edge approaches to privacy-preserving federated learning, earning a total of $157,000 in prizes. They reflect the breadth and depth of technical talent in both countries, with teams from academic institutions, global technology companies, and privacy start-ups among them. The second phase of the challenges, which started earlier in November, will see participating teams construct the solutions envisioned in their technical papers. They will also have opportunities to interact with regulators and government agencies in order to help shape the development of solutions that adhere to key regulatory principles. In the second phase, innovators will compete for prizes totaling $915,000. The UK and US governments are also accepting applications for red teams to participate in the third phase of the challenges. To assess the final winners, red teams will rigorously test the privacy-preserving capabilities of the top-scoring solutions from the second phase of the challenges. Red team recruitment is now open, with applications due on November 23. Top-scoring red teams will receive prizes from a pool of $225,000. The participants' challenge problems are based on artificially generated or synthetic data sets that are representative of real-world use cases but contain no actual client information. This article continues to discuss the winners of the first phase of the US-UK PETS prize challenges.