Khaoula Chehbouni wins the 2022 Award for the Best Master’s Thesis
May 5, 2023
Khaoula Chehbouni, a graduate of the Maîtrise en gestion (MSc) – intelligence d’affaires program has received the 2022 Award for the Best Master’s Thesis from HEC Montréal for Mitigating Online Grooming With Federated Learning, co-directed by faculty members Gilles Caporossi and Golnoosh Farnadi.
Protecting children online
According to Cybertip, reports of online luring cases have increased by 815% in the past five years*. These alarming figures reflect the isolation and significant rise in screen time caused by the pandemic, as well as the difficulties faced by parents in monitoring their children’s virtual environment. Even though mechanisms for ensuring children’s online safety do exist, they are often very intrusive and do not guarantee data privacy.
“We introduce an initial strategy for the early detection of online grooming** which aims to ensure a safe online environment for children while respecting their privacy. This is done by implementing a practical, cross-device, federated learning framework based on users’ textual conversations with formal differential privacy guarantees.”
Sihem Taboubi, Director of the MSc Program, and Khaoula Chehbouni.
Her research focused on three main issues:
- Developing a powerful framework to detect online grooming.
- Making sure that it only detects sexual predators and does not accuse anybody wrongly, since a false charge could lead to serious repercussions.
- Ensuring that its implementation upholds the privacy of people using social media platforms.
An increased presence
Khaoula Chehbouni’s project gained visibility from very early on. Notable achievements on her part included presenting her work at IVADO Digital October and at 2 workshops in the NeurIPS 2022 Conference in New Orleans. The feedback that she received during these various events culminated in the writing and expansion of a paper on this topic.
Her thesis has also opened the door to the field of responsible artificial intelligence. Upon completing her master’s at the school, she worked as a data scientist specializing in ethics at Statistics Canada, before becoming a research assistant in ethics at Mila in January 2023. In September 2023, she will pursue a PhD in computer science which is being offered jointly by Mila and the Université de Montréal.
Finalists
Nineteen members of the student community were also singled out as finalists for the Best Master’s Thesis Award.
| Name | Specialization |
|---|---|
| Aïssatou Ba | Économie appliquée |
| Habib Bardi | Gestion de l’innovation sociale |
| Laurie Carmichael | User Experience |
| Caroline Chaussegros de Léry | Marketing |
| Mariana Cordova Perez | User Experience |
| Camille Costes | Marketing |
| Kaveh Dehkhoda | Global Supply Chain Management |
| Rui Fan | Data Science Business Analytics |
| Shady Guertin-Lahoud | Expérience utilisateur |
| Félix Joly | Transformation numérique des organisations |
| Caroline Lévesque-Pelletier | Marketing |
| Chaïmae Merbouh | Transformation numérique des organisations |
| Elinora Pentcheva | Marketing |
| Marie-Michèle Percio | Marketing |
| Marisa Keya Radatz | Data Science Business Analytics |
| Laurie-Jade Rochon | Expérience utilisateur |
| Benjamin Semujanga | Gestion des ressources humaines |
| Jenna Yee Kin Hiung | Intelligence d'affaires |
| Yilin Zhang | Applied Financial Economics |
* Source : https://cyberaide.ca/en/campaigns-and-media/news-releases/2023/safer-internet-day-2023
** All the strategies used by predators to lure children into sexual exploitation.