Meet Nathalie Baracaldo, Ph.D. in IS
Nathalie Baracaldo leads the AI Security and Privacy Solutions team and is a Research Staff Member at IBM’s Almaden Research Center in San Jose, CA. Nathalie is passionate about delivering machine learning solutions that are highly accurate, withstand adversarial attacks and protect data privacy. Her current research focuses on two main areas: federated learning, where models are trained without directly accessing training data and adversarial machine learning, where defenses are designed to withstand potential attacks to the machine learning pipeline. Nathalie has led her team to the design of the IBM Federated Learning framework, which is now part of the Watson Machine Learning product. Nathalie is also the primary investigator for the DARPA program “Guaranteeing AI Robustness Against Deception” (GARD). In 2020, Nathalie received the IBM Master Inventor distinction for her contributions to IBM Intellectual Property and innovation. Nathalie also received the 2021 Corporate Technical Recognition, one of the highest recognitions provided to IBMers for breakthrough technical achievements that have led to notable market and industry success for IBM. This recognition was awarded for Nathalie's contribution to the Trusted AI Initiative. Nathalie has received multiple best paper awards and published in top-tier conferences and journals. Nathalie received her Ph.D. degree from the University of Pittsburgh in 2016. Nathalie also holds a master’s degree with Cum Laude distinction in computer sciences from the Universidad de los Andes, Colombia. Prior to that, she earned two undergraduate degrees in Computer Science and Industrial Engineering at the same university.
Nathalie’s Achievements
· Nathalie is the primary investigator for the DARPA program Guaranteeing AI Robustness Against Deception (GARD), where AI security is investigated.
· In 2020, Nathalie received the IBM Master Inventor distinction for her contributions to the IBM Intellectual Property and innovation.
· Nathalie also received the 2021 Corporate Technical Recognition, one of the highest recognitions provided to IBMers for breakthrough technical achievements that have led to notable market and industry success for IBM. This recognition was awarded for Nathalie's contribution to the Trusted AI initiative.
· Nathalie edited the book: Federated Learning A Comprehensive Overview of Methods and Applications, Eds. Heiko Ludwig, Nathalie Baracaldo, Springer, 2022. The book is available in paper and digitally on Amazon, Google books and Apple books, Springer and other distributers.
· Nathalie’s has been interviewed multiple times. Her interview on Federated Learning is available in the Data Science Podcast available on Spotify. Nathalie was also interviewed by ML DC_THURS available on YouTube.