Security + AI + Society
Tobin is a senior PhD candidate at MIT on a Fulbright Future Scholarship, advised by Sandy Pentland at the MIT Media Lab. Tobin's research is focused on building privacy, verifiability, and regulatory compliance into frontier AI from first principles.
Tobin's work is at the intersection of security, AI, and society, spanning across fields from private data sharing to verifiable evaluations for large AI models. He has contributed to recent work on regulation of generative AI and is keenly interested in working on practically deployable solutions to solve privacy and security challenges in a changing world of technology.
About Me: I have a fellowship with the E14 VC fund, helping with AI investments, and previously founded a startup (which failed, great learning experience!). I have a non-executive role on the board of the MIT bigdata Living Lab in Adelaide and sit on the Graduate Student Council at MIT. In my undergraduate, I was Valedictorian of the graduating class of Mathematics, Computer Science, and Electrical Engineering.
Before all that, I grew up in the "Peanut capital of Australia", the agricultural town of Kingaroy, Queensland; but I consider Adelaide my real home. Don't hesitate to reach out if you have something interesting to talk about.
Some Recent Work
Verifiable Model Evaluations
Discover our methods for ensuring AI model integrity.
Private Retrieval Augmented Generation
Learn about our innovative RAG techniques.
Open Problems in Technical AI Governance
Explore key challenges in AI governance.
Personhood Credentials
Learn about our work on protecting digital spaces.
Transparency by Design for LLMs
Understanding how RAG can provide auditability and updateability for LLMs.
Zero-knowledge tax disclosures
Discover our research on privacy-preserving financial disclosures.
Decline of the AI Data Commons
Explore our research on the changing landscape of AI data.
Data Consent and Provenance are Broken
Discover the challenges in AI data management.
Plural Management
A management system for open-source teams that naturally distributed management and ownership over time.
News Stories & Talks
MIT News
Privacy and Personhood online with future AI
TEDx Boston
Reimagining security for AI
BBC Radio Interview
Can we keep AI out of human only spaces?
Adelaide Alumni Interview
A journey to MIT
The Advertiser
Southern Star
Seminar Talk
The Future of Data Science with LLMs
New York Times
AI Data Restrictions
Life Updates
- 2024, Aug Contributed to a large project on personhood credentials with collaborators from OpenAI, Microsoft, and OpenMined.
- 2024, June Went paragliding through the Alps in the south of France.
- 2024, May Gave a TEDx talk at TEDx Boston on AI Security.
- 2024, April Ran 🏃♂️ a whole marathon on my birthday for no clear reason.
- 2024, Jan Presented at Davos on privacy, security, and LLMs.
- 2024, Jan Contributed to the Singapore M3S program engaging with AI policy. Ate a lot of hawker food and ran 20km around the city.
- 2023, Dec Awarded an MIT Generative AI grant to research end-to-end privacy for generative AI.
- 2023, Summer Interned at Microsoft Research in the Cryptography and Plurality teams. Lived on a houseboat while I was there.
- 2023, Oct Downloaded the whole internet as part of the new Data Provenance initiative work for transparency in pretraining data.
- 2023, June Started a fellowship with the E14 VC Fund focusing on AI investments.
- 2023, Jan Ran a marathon in LA with my friends and then took a road trip in a Tesla around the West Coast.