Simplifying Federated Learning Jobs With Flame

Myungjin Lee (Cisco)

Federated machine learning (FL) is gaining a lot of traction across research communities and industries. FL allows machine learning (ML) model training without sharing data across different parties, thus natively supporting data privacy. However, designing and executing FL jobs is not an easy task today. Flame is an open-source project that aims to ease the composition of FL jobs and the management of their lifecycle across different environments. Towards those ends, Flame is architected to be open and extensible from its inception. This talk will present an overview of the project and a demo on how the Flame system works in a Kubernetes environment.

Myungjin Lee is a Senior Researcher at Cisco's Emerging Technologies and Incubation (ET&I). He leads research on systems for edge computing. His current focus is on federated learning and its use cases at the edge. He is passionate about building software for distributed systems and computer networks.

Prior to Cisco, he worked at Salesforce as a software engineer, where he led a secure cross-datacenter communication project. He was also an Assistant Professor at the University of Edinburgh, UK, where he led research activities around systems and networks including datacenter networks, network telemetry, SDN, etc.