Bell Labs Phd Internship - Large-Scale Federated Learning Systems

Come create the technology that helps the world act together

Nokia is committed to innovation and technology leadership across mobile, fixed and cloud networks. Your career here will have a positive impact on people’s lives and will help us build the capabilities needed for a more productive, sustainable, and inclusive world.

We challenge ourselves to create an inclusive way of working where we are open to new ideas, empowered to take risks and fearless to bring our authentic selves to work.

The team you'll be part of

Nokia Bell Labs is the world-renowned research arm of Nokia, having invented many of the foundational technologies that underpin information and communications networks and all digital devices and systems. This research has produced nine Nobel Prizes, five Turing Awards and numerous other awards.

The Data-Driven Software Systems Research department is an international team of research scientists working at the intersection of software systems and software engineering research. The team’s mission is to shape the future of software systems, from creation to execution.

What you will learn and contribute to

Federated learning (FL) is increasingly deployed among multiple clients (e.g., mobile devices) to train a shared model over decentralized data. To address the privacy concerns, FL systems need to protect the clients’ data from being revealed during training and also control the data leakage through trained models when exposed to untrusted domains. As a concrete example, distributed differential privacy (DP) offers one appealing solution in this regard as it achieves an informed tradeoff between privacy and utility without a trusted server. However, such distributed mechanisms (including distributed DP mechanisms) work impractically in real world. For instance, to handle realistic scenarios with client dropout and clients being unindexable, these existing mechanisms often make strong assumptions about client properties yet still result in either poor privacy guarantees or unsatisfactory training accuracy. During your internship, you will get the opportunity to work with cutting-edge researchers to innovate new mechanisms to beat the status quo and address these challenges, as well as experience the whole research cycle in an industrial research setting.

Your skills and experience

• Student enrolled in a PhD program in Computer Science or other relevant areas.
• A proven track record in research, with publications in prestigious conferences and/or journals, is a big plus.
• Strong systems and programming skills.
• Strong written and spoken English communications skills

Hungry for more detail? You can read recent published papers by the team here.

What we offer

Nokia offers flexible and hybrid working schemes, continuous learning opportunities, well-being programs to support you mentally and physically, opportunities to join and get supported by employee resource groups, mentoring programs and highly diverse teams with an inclusive culture where people thrive and are empowered.

During your internship you will get hands-on experience using state-of-the-art software techniques. You will work with a research team to run experiments, build software prototypes and present your findings.

Nokia is committed to inclusion and is an equal opportunity employer

Nokia has received the following recognitions for its commitment to inclusion & equality:

• One of the World’s Most Ethical Companies by Ethisphere
• Gender-Equality Index by Bloomberg
• Workplace Pride Global Benchmark
• LGBT+ equality & best place to work by HRC Foundation

At Nokia, we act inclusively and respect the uniqueness of people.

Nokia’s employment decisions are made regardless of race, color, national or ethnic origin, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, marital status, disability, protected veteran status or other characteristics protected by law.
We are committed to a culture of inclusion built upon our core value of respect.

Join us and be part of a company where you will feel included and empowered to succeed.