Nominee Director Prof. Ben Rubinstein

Prof. Rubinstein is Deputy Dean (Research) and Professor in AI Safety at the University of Melbourne. He actively researches topics in machine learning, particularly security and privacy implications of AI, such as adversarial machine learning and differential privacy. Prior to joining the University of Melbourne in 2013, he spent four years in industry research labs including Microsoft Research Silicon Valley and IBM Research Australia, and received his PhD (Computer Science) from UC Berkeley in 2010.

He has been part of teams that have: analysed privacy at the Australian Bureau of Statistics, National Australia Bank, and Transport for NSW; examined robustness of translation systems to data poisoning attacks with Facebook Meta; helped identify and plug side-channel attacks against the Firefox browser; deanonymised Victorian Myki transport data and an unprecedented Australian Medicare data release, prompting introduction of the Re-identification Offence Bill 2016; developed scalable Bayesian approaches to record linkage tested by US Census; and shipped production systems for record linkage in Bing and the Xbox360.

He co-leads the CATCH MURI, a team of 16 experts across 7 US/AUS universities that undertakes fundamental discovery in robust human-AI teams for cybersecurity.