Security + AI + Society
Tobin is a researcher at MIT and Stanford, focused on building more robust societal and digital infrastructure for the AI age, with work across privacy, human-centered control, verifiability, and regulatory compliance for AI. Tobin's PhD at MIT was advised by Sandy Pentland at the MIT Media Lab and was fully funded by a Fulbright Future Scholarship. Tobin is a fellow with the E14 VC fund supporting AI investments and has a broad research background ranging from confidential and verifiable AI tooling to regulatory contributions to privacy in the future of AI.
About Me: I'm a recovering mega-nerd who was Valedictorian of my undergraduate where I studied Mathematics and Computer Science; a first-time startup founder (which failed, great learning experience!); and a guy who liked running a bit much. 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.
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?
MIT Media Lab Interview
My life at MIT
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
- 2025, Jan Spending a lot of time in SF. Say hi!
- 2025, Jan Running AI agents & security workshop in Davos alongside the World Economic Forum.
- 2024, Dec Presented two papers at Neurips 2024.
- 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.