Peer-to-peer Approach for Distributed Privacy-preserving Deep Learning

The revolutionary advances in machine learning and Artificial Intelligence have enables people to rethink how we integrate information, analyze data, and use the resulting insights to improve decision making. Deep learning is the most effective, supervised, time and cost efficient machine learning approach which is becoming popular in building today’s applications such as self-driving cars, medical diagnosis systems, automatic speech recognition, machine translation, text-to-speech conversion and many others. On the other hand the success of deep learning among others depends on large volume of data available for training the model. Depending on the domain of application, the data needed for training the model may contain sensitive and private information whose privacy needs to be preserved. One of the challenges that need to be address in deep learning is how to ensure that the privacy of training data is preserved without sacrificing the accuracy of the model. In this work, we propose, design and implement a decentralized deep learning system using peer-to-peer architecture that enables multiple data owners to jointly train deep learning models without disclosing their training data to one another and at the same time benefit from each other’s dataset through exchanging model parameters during the training. We implemented our approach using two popular deep learning frameworks namely Keras and TensorFlow. We evaluated our approach on two popular datasets in deep learning community namely MNIST and Fashion-MNIST datasets. Using our approach, we were able to train models whose accuracy is relatively close to models trained under privacy-violating setting, while at the same time preserving the privacy of the training data

HausaNLP at SemEval-2023 Task 12: Leveraging African Low Resource TweetData for Sentiment Analysis

We present the findings of SemEval-2023 Task 12, a shared task on sentiment analysis for low-resource African languages using Twitter dataset. The task featured three subtasks; subtask A is monolingual sentiment classification with 12 tracks which are all monolingual languages, subtask B is multilingual sentiment classification using the tracks in subtask A and subtask C is a zero-shot sentiment classification. We present the results and findings of subtask A, subtask B and subtask C. We also release the code on github. Our goal is to leverage low-resource tweet data using pre-trained Afro-xlmr-large, AfriBERTa-Large, Bert-base-arabic-camelbert-da-sentiment (Arabic-camelbert), Multilingual-BERT (mBERT) and BERT models for sentiment analysis of 14 African languages. The datasets for these subtasks consists of a gold standard multi-class labeled Twitter datasets from these languages. Our results demonstrate that Afro-xlmr-large model performed better compared to the other models in most of the languages datasets. Similarly, Nigerian languages: Hausa, Igbo, and Yoruba achieved better performance compared to other languages and this can be attributed to the higher volume of data present in the languages

Motives Behind Preference of Internet Communication Tools Among University Students

Researches on internet communication tool (ICT) patronage among university students are of paramount importance owing to the fact that ICT enriched students with communication skills and prepare them for future jobs as communication accounts for the major time spent at work by managers. The aim of this study is to determine factors that affect university students’ preference while choosing ICT. This research was conducted at Near East University, Cyprus during the 2015 spring semester. 99 students voluntarily responded to the questionnaire that was developed by the authors. The data collected was analyzed based on descriptive techniques of mean, frequency, and percentage. It was found that students preferred WhatsApp over other ICTs based on its beautiful styles, compatibility with mobile OS, public influence, cost-effective services, data consumption and ease of use as the key factors toward the preference. To make this research significant to future studies, the finding was discussed in-line with previous researches. The results of this research added empirical data to related studies and could help developers of ICTs, educational technologist, and online administrators