Ruoxi Jia (UC Berkeley) - Towards an Equitable and Trustworthy Economy of Data

Towards an Equitable and Trustworthy Economy of Data

The data economy is a rising ecosystem in which data are produced, distributed, and consumed at an unprecedented scale. On the one hand, the current data economy creates new levels of prosperity by driving rapid advances in machine learning and automation. On the other hand, it has some fundamental challenges that need to be addressed. First and foremost, how much is data worth? Data is valuable, yet a principled data valuation method is lacking. The answer to this question has profound implications: it will open up new data sources by facilitating and incentivizing data sharing and reduce economic inequality by allowing individuals to profit from their data. We also need to address the issues of privacy and security that arise from data-driven applications.

In this talk, I will mainly present the theory and algorithms for data valuation. I will start by introducing a principled notion for data value and then present a suite of algorithms that we developed to efficiently compute the data value. I will also discuss the applications of our data valuation techniques to the tasks beyond data pricing, such as detecting noisy labels. At last, I will present my work in the space of privacy-preserving and trustworthy data analytics.

Host: Michael Franklin