Privacy & ML Researcher
The selections below from 1826 capture the advance of liberal ideas in Britain, as reformers systematically challenged entrenched aristocratic monopolies over trade and education. In economics, a growing consensus pushed back against the protectionist Corn Laws in favor of free trade, demanding policies that served broader social interests rather than just wealthy landowners. This same egalitarian…
At the close of the spring semester, I spent a bit of time advising students on the near-term: which classes to choose for the fall, how to prepare for graduate school, ideas for things to do over the summer, etc. During these discussions, I like to ask students about their interests. Most of the time, they don’t know. If they have an answer, it’s often something trendy, e.g., NLP or AI. Either…
I have a new paper out with my colleagues from UMass Amherst and Penn State: Fast Private Adaptive Query Answering for Large Data Domains. Marginals are statistics that capture low-dimensional structure and correlations among sets of attributes in a dataset and are an important building block for differentially private algorithms. In this paper, we focus on answering large workloads of marginals…
I recently gave a talk at the Privacy and Public Policy Conference on measuring income mobility under differential privacy. This is joint work with Miguel Fuentes that combines techniques from differentially private query answering with methods for measuring mobility in economics. I’ve had this project idea on the backburner for a while, and it was great to finally work on it and share it with the…
Below are some interesting articles I’ve read in 2025. They fall into a few categories: the mathematics of data privacy, popular mathematics, politics, and nineteenth century philosophy. For data privacy, we look at how technical details may be hindering adoption of differential privacy as well as scaling laws for differentially private language models. Next, we look at excellent popular math…
Seven years removed from the armistice, 1925 finds the Western intellectual world grappling with reconstruction, not merely of borders and economies but of the conceptual foundations underlying science and the social order. The selections below reflect this theme of rebuilding. Economists theorize about institutional frameworks and the distinction between productive investment and mere…
Below are some interesting books I’ve read in 2025. This year’s list is topically wide-ranging: from the mathematics of data privacy and information theory to the history of economic thought, from early analytic philosophy and contemporary metaphilosophy to weird fiction, and even an early nineteenth-century meditation on the art of eating well. If you have some thoughts on my list or would like…
The Fortnightly Review was a prominent British periodical in the 1870s, edited by John Morley, publishing articles on a wide range of topics including literature, philosophy, politics, and economics. A quick perusal of the selections below illustrates that the Fortnightly had an excellent year in 1875. Once I started digging in, I found more interesting articles than I had time to read,…
A persistent theme throughout the 1820s is the tension between Enlightenment ideals and conservative reaction. The books and articles discussed below capture various facets of this conflict. William Hazlitt’s collection of essays examines intellectuals from the turn of the century, many of whom became swept up in the Romantic movement and adopted illiberal views. J. C. L. de Sismondi’s survey…
Below is a collection of interesting articles I’ve read in 2024. Three papers are on differential privacy and adjacent topics. There’s a recent method for differentially private SGD utilizing methods from private query answering, an intuitive watermarking scheme for language models, and a paper from 1986 that proposed $k$-anonymity before it was formalized as a criterion for de-identification.…