Professor Yiu-ming Cheung and His Team Win the Best Theoretical Paper Award in WI-IAT 2020

Professor Yiu-ming Cheung, Professor of Department of Computer Science, and Dr. Jian Lou from Department of Computer Science, Emory University, USA received the Best Theoretical Paper Award for their co-authored paper “Projection-free Online Empirical Risk Minimization with Privacy-preserving and Privacy Expiration“ at the 2020 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Joint Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology (WI-IAT'20).

The award-winning paper proposes a projection-free Constrained Online Convex Optimization (COCO) with differential privacy guarantee, a de facto standard for privacy preserving. They rigorously analyze its utility in terms of regret rate, which shows that, even without the expensive projection/proximal operators, it still matches the differentially privacy COCO with projection/proximal operations. In fact, this work is the first attempt to explore projection-free differentially private COCO, and thus broadens the applicability of COCO with privacy guarantee, in the fields of streaming machine learning and data mining, for example.

The 4-day Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology provided a premier international forum to bring together researchers and practitioners from diverse fields for presentation of original research results, as well as exchange and dissemination of innovative and practical development experiences on Web intelligence and intelligent agent technology research and applications.