Federated Learning: Organizational Opportunities, Challenges, and Adoption Strategies

Restrictive rules for data sharing in many industries have led to the development of \ac{FL}. \ac{FL} is a \ac{ML} technique that allows distributed clients to train models collaboratively without the need to share their respective training data with others. In this article, we first explore the technical basics of FL and its potential applications. Second, we present a conceptual framework for the adoption of \ac{FL}, mapping organizations along the lines of their \ac{AI} capabilities and environment. We then discuss why exemplary organizations in different industries, including industry consortia, established banks, public authorities, and data-intensive SMEs might consider different approaches to \ac{FL}. To conclude, we argue that \ac{FL} presents an institutional shift with ample interdisciplinary research opportunities for the business and information systems engineering community.

Secure Federated Learning for Residential Short Term Load Forecasting

The inclusion of intermittent and renewable energy sources has increased the importance of demand forecasting in power systems. Smart meters can play a critical role in demand forecasting due to the measurement granularity they provide. Consumers' privacy concerns, reluctance of utilities and vendors to share data with competitors or third parties, and regulatory constraints are some constraints smart meter forecasting faces. This paper examines a collaborative machine learning method for short-term demand forecasting using smart meter data as a solution to the previous constraints. Privacy preserving techniques and federated learning enable to ensure consumers' confidentiality concerning both, their data, the models generated using it (Differential Privacy), and the communication mean (Secure Aggregation). The methods evaluated take into account several scenarios that explore how traditional centralized approaches could be projected in the direction of a decentralized, collaborative and private system. The results obtained over the evaluations provided almost perfect privacy budgets (1.39,$10e^{-5}$) and (2.01,$10e^{-5}$) with a negligible performance compromise.