Roy Rinberg

Me_circa_2019

Welcome to my site. I’m Roy Rinberg. You can find my substack newsletter here : https://technicallyprivate.substack.com/!

Who am I? (at a high-level)

I’m a computer scientist and software engineer interested in ways to use technology for positive social change - most recently, I’m interested in privacy technology.

I’m currently a Master’s student at Columbia, conducting research with Professor Rachel Cummings and Professor Steven Bellovin on Private Machine Learning. I am partially supported by the Advanced Master’s Research Specialization award at Columbia.

I created and organize the group Technically Private; 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.

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 current technical thoughts revolve around:

  1. Tools 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:
    1. How can we make better ways for people to “hedge” in the tech industry. Or in other words, how can people (like me) effectively do something good for the world, while also building general career capital.
    2. What are problems in the world which require truly technical solutions (are there any?).
  2. How to effectively engage with the Effective Altruism community.
  3. Climbing. Triathloning! ~~Climbing again! ~~ Triathloning (I never doubted you)

My hobbies:

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