The University of Southern California and Amazon have joined forces to establish the Center for Secure and Trusted Machine Learning. Housed at USC’s Viterbi School of Engineering, the center will provide support to researchers who will focus on developing innovative approaches to privacy-preserving machine learning solutions.

This university-industry partnership symbolizes both organizations’ shared commitment to "advancing understanding and developing solutions," said USC Provost Charles F. Zukoski in the university’s announcement of the partnership. Plans call for the center to leverage talent from both entities in a cooperative effort to unearth new research in this controversial area of study.

In USC’s announcement, Prem Natarajan, Alexa AI vice president of natural understanding, added, "We are delighted to bring together top talent at Amazon and USC in a joint mission to drive ground-breaking advances in privacy and security preserving machine learning—advances that enable us to continue to safely and securely deliver experiences that enrich and delight our customers worldwide."

The joint research center also will support an annual fellowship program for doctoral students where Amazon machine learning fellowship recipients will have an opportunity to gain up-close experience with solution-driven research. Further, through this collaborative effort, the organizations plan to host workshops and training and recruiting events for college and high school students.