There's a very interesting (and complex) US-UK challenge program to apply innovative privacy enhancing technologies either to reduce financial fraud or the improve predictions of individual risk during pandemics. One really interesting aspect of the program is the extensive use of synthetic data. The program has just announced its first awards. It's worth at least reading the short announcement from NSF summarizing the program and the awards at

https://beta.nsf.gov/news/winners-announced-first-phase-us-uk-privacy

More information on the overall program here

https://petsprizechallenges.com

Details on the winning US teams can be found here

https://drivendata.co/blog/federated-learning-pets-prize-winners-phase1

My thanks to the always-amazing Gary Price for noting this program.

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI