Welcome to my site. I’m Roy Rinberg. I’m interested in ways to use technology for positive social change - most recently, I’m interested in privacy technology. I’m currently a Harvard PhD student, working with Professor Seth Neel and Professor Salil Vadhan on “Trustworthy” Machine Learning.

My current technical thoughts revolve around:

1. Tools and frameworks for making private computation possible (particularly in a machine-learning systems environment).
2. Laws (primarily US laws) that incentivize technical forms of privacy for developers and disincentivize privacy leaks by companies.

The rest of my thoughts mostly revolve around:

1. The intersection of technology and tech-policy. In particular: how can we make better ways for people to “hedge” in the tech industry. Or in other words, how can people (like me) do something good for the world, while also building general career capital.
2. Climbing. Triathloning! Climbing again! Triathloning (I never doubted you)

Communities I am/have-been a part of

I created and organize the group Technically Private (www.technicallyprivate.com); a group of mostly graduate students across many universities, who talk about Privacy and Security. If you’re interested in joining - send a request to the above link.

Previously, I was a Master’s student at Columbia, conducting research with Professor Rachel Cummings and Professor Steven Bellovin on Private Machine Learning. And before that I worked at Ouster, a lidar company, as a software engineer.

Writing:

I’m a big proponent of learning in public and I intend to use this website as a platform for fleshing out my own ideas, while also giving you an idea of what it’s like inside my brain. I write about public-interest tech and privacy on this website and substack! I sometimes write on Medium too : https://royrinberg.medium.com/.

My hobbies:

1. Triathloning
2. Reading (or honestly, listening to audiobooks).
3. I’d like to write more, so… writing!
4. Drone Photography
5. Climbing
6. Frisbee