Jack Ma-backed Ant Group is partnering with Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University (NTU) to advance privacy-preserving computing technologies (PPC) in a research collaboration.
The year-long research will focus on Private Set Intersection (PSI), a cryptographic protocol that allows parties to compute the intersection of their private datasets without revealing anything beyond the intersection, to ensure the privacy of all parties.
The researchers from NTU Singapore's Strategic Centre for Research in Privacy-Preserving Technologies & Systems will collaborate to increase the practical capability and security of PSI, optimise its efficiency, and develop applications for real-world use cases.
Ant Group's CTO for International Business, Jerry Yin said the company was excited to join the partnership to promote research into PPC technologies, including PSI, and support technical innovations in Singapore.
The company said it has been active in driving advances in PPC recently and claims to have topped the list of patent applications for these technologies in 2022, with 1,152 filed patent applications.
Ant Group had open-sourced its PPC framework, aiming to make the technologies more accessible to global developers.
Since its launch in 2016, the framework has integrated comprehensive privacy-preserving technologies such as multi-party secure computation, federated learning, homomorphic encryption, differential privacy, zero-knowledge proof, and a trusted execution environment.
It has been implemented in multiple use cases including healthcare, insurance, and risk management, the company said.
