Mission
Internship Objective
Core Goal: Design and implement a negotiation mechanism for open, federated, service-based learning systems — enabling autonomous participants to agree on the terms of their collaboration (data contribution, model access, reward sharing, trust requirements) without a central authority imposing participation.
Scientific Context: Federated Learning assumes participants cooperate. In reality, participants are rational agents with private costs, competing interests, and heterogeneous data quality. Negotiation is the mechanism that transforms a set of self-interested parties into a functioning federation — making it the missing layer between FL theory and open FL practice.
Method: Three phases over three months: (1) literature review on FL, Open FL, Trust, and Negotiation — building the theoretical foundation; (2) comparative study of FL platforms to identify which can host a negotiation layer; (3) design and first implementation of the negotiation protocol on the selected platform.
The key reference paper (Bena et al.) provides the architectural context: a Trust Management System for collaborative, federated, service-based applications. The negotiation mechanism is the component this internship contributes to that architecture — answering the question of how parties agree to join, what they commit to, and what they receive in return.
Research Questions
- RQ1 — Agreement: What are the dimensions of a participation agreement in open FL — what must be negotiated (contribution level, reward, privacy budget, trust threshold) and by whom?
- RQ2 — Protocol: What negotiation protocol (bilateral, multilateral, auction-based, bargaining-based) best fits the open FL context, balancing fairness, efficiency, and computational cost?
- RQ3 — Trust-Negotiation Coupling: How should trust scores (from the TMS of Bena et al.) influence negotiation outcomes — and how should negotiated commitments update trust scores over time?
- RQ4 — Platform Support: Which FL platform best supports the implementation of a negotiation layer, and what extensions are required to host the negotiation protocol alongside FL training?
