Ben Rubinstein

Details : Lecturer/ Senior Lecturer in Cyber Security : The University of Melbourne Careers at The University of Melbourne

We are hiring continuing academic in #cyber security! Come join one of Australia's best groups (brokenassumptions.org), alongside stars like @bipr.bsky.social, @shaananc.bsky.social, Olga Ohrimenko, Thuan Pham, Xingliang Yuan, & Sarah Erfani. jobs.unimelb.edu.au/en/job/91947...

CBA trials myGov ID verification The Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) has begun trialling a myGov verification program that will allow customers to verify their identities with their myGov accounts rather than handing over identi...

CBA trials myGov ID verification www.cyberdaily.au/security/116...

The government plan features a potentially controversial scheme to unlock public data to help fuel the growth of AI businesses. This includes anonymised NHS data, which will be available for “researchers and innovators” to train their AI models. The government says there would be “strong privacy-preserving safeguards” and the data would never be owned by private companies.

Curious to see how they plan to anonymise our NHS data for training ML models. I personally wouldn’t know how to start doing that

www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

UK government unveils multibillion-pound AI investment plan to boost national capacity UK government unveils a bold new plan to unleash the power of AI, aiming to transform public services, boost economic growth, and cement the nation's ...

If the UK can do it, why can't Australia? www.computing.co.uk/news/2025/ai...

The NACC (Australia's Commonwealth attempt at an anti-corruption commission) has been quite the disappointment.

Congrats Andy!

Excited to co-organise another summer school on learning theory! This time in beautiful Odense, Denmark. Please share and apply here:
event.sdu.dk/algoml2025

BoM data finds 2024 was Australia’s second-hottest year on record Rise in greenhouse gases responsible for average temperatures rising to 1.46C above average, with one climate scientist saying this is ‘the norm now’

BoM data finds 2024 was Australia’s second-hottest year on record www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

I seem to be on a "defend LLMs for personal use" kick. It seemed like fun to see how I've used them in the past month. In most cases, I first did a search that proved useless (often, spending a long time following links that looked like they *could* be helpful…but weren't). ↵

I've been thinking about in-context learning for nearly 3 years. While there is still plenty I don't fully understand, five papers have--to a very large extent--shaped my perspective on it, and I believe everyone should read them.

Bitcoin, ether, dogecoin – Chalmers says the future may be crypto Derided by critics as a waste of electricity, cryptocurrencies are the way of the future, its backers say. Australia’s treasurer believes they will have a role.

Fuck no.

www.smh.com.au/politics/fed...

Learning theory and methods for novel types of distributional shifts. at The University of Manchester on FindAPhD.com PhD Project - Learning theory and methods for novel types of distributional shifts. at The University of Manchester, listed on FindAPhD.com

📢 Outstanding PhD opportunity!

The successful candidate will be based at The University of Manchester Dept. of CS ✨ to work on learning theory and methods for novel types of distributional shifts, co-supervised with @samikaski.bsky.social

⏳ DL 31.Jan.2025.
www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

As the year winds down, the summer sun shines and boxing day does its thing 🏏, reminder that if you want to follow #ComputerScience academics in Australia 🇦🇺 and NZ 🇳🇿, there's a starter pack perfect for you: go.bsky.app/N5x6GLQ

Loving the new Yayoi Kusama exhibition @ National Gallery Victoria #Melbourne

Announcing the accepted papers for ALT 2025! It was a very competitive year, and we were able to accept only 51 of 144 submissions. Thanks to my co-chair Po-Ling Loh and the entire program committee for their hard work!

See you in Milan in February!

algorithmiclearningtheory.org/alt2025/acce...

The School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh is hiring a lecturer or reader in embodied natural language processing. Apply by 31 Jan 2025 at edin.ac/4fqgawg

Screenshot showing misleading edits

Needless to say, we disagree with that headline. It turns out to be an opinion piece we wrote for them a few months ago and they just published — with a bunch of changes they didn’t tell us about. wired.com/story/human-...

How will Australia's teen social media actually work? Australia's Parliament has passed one of the strictest social media crackdowns in the world. Under the new law, anyone under 16 years old will be banned from opening a social media account.

I was on NPR with
@bobbyallyn.bsky.social re Australia’s teen social media ban.

Tests by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology found that age algorithms are off by an average of 5yrs for West Africans–discriminating in practice.

🎧 Take a listen! www.npr.org/2024/12/09/n...

Found slides by Ankur Moitra (presented at a TCS For All event) on "How to do theoretical research." Full of great advice!

My favourite: "Find the easiest problem you can't solve. The more embarrassing, the better!"

Slides: drive.google.com/file/d/15VaT...
TCS For all: sigact.org/tcsforall/

I look forward to co-directing the Canadian AI Safety Institute (CAISI) Research Program at CIFAR with @catherineregis.bsky.social

We will be designing the program in the coming months and will soon share ways to get involved with this new community.

Read more here: cifar.ca/cifarnews/20...

Congrats! Great program and choice of leadership!

Now that @mkearnsphilly.bsky.social is here, this starter pack just became the real deal. Better refollow it. go.bsky.app/21nFz12

Oracle-Efficient Reinforcement Learning for Max Value Ensembles Reinforcement learning (RL) in large or infinite state spaces is notoriously challenging, both theoretically (where worst-case sample and computational complexities must scale with state space cardina...

Actual content post: Have not talked much about this work yet but we have a paper on Oracle-Efficient Reinforcement Learning for Max Value Ensembles at this year's #NeurIPS. We provide an efficient algorithm to ensemble policies given a value function oracle. arxiv.org/abs/2405.16739

🔥🔥🔥

Scientist turns down $500 million to keep waste-to-compost invention in Australia Australia means so much to Iranian-born biotechnologist Sam Jahangard, he has made a huge sacrifice to keep his developments in the country instead of selling them internationally.

Touching story of the innovations of an immigrant overcoming adversity. As with so many other skilled immigrants, Australia benefits. Short sighted to scape goat people who want to build a better society, economy and world. We should welcome them instead. www.abc.net.au/news/2024-12...

YouTube video by Institute for Advanced Study Reading Alan Turing - Avi Wigderson

An advent calendar of some of my favourite TCS/Maths talks. Day #1: Avi Wigderson on Reading Alan Turing.

It is a gem of a talk, full of insights about Turing's work, writing style, and influences on mathematics and computer science. Pure joy!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Uk_...

I'm excited about a new paper that gives tractable generalizations of Aumann's Agreement Theorem, with an eye towards human/model collaboration in machine learning. We can implement algorithms that can "converse" with people and quickly come to agreement on downstream actions. 🧵

Wow 😳

Two weeks remaining to apply to this position.

I'll also be at NeurIPS, if you want to chat you can DM or email me. :)