Max Cairney-Leeming

I am a PhD Student at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA), near-ish Vienna, under the supervision of Christoph Lampert. I work on Differential Privacy for (deep) Machine Learning, and am interested in the intersection between DP and other concerns about machine learning, e.g. fairness, and also in the tradeoff between privacy and achieving good utility, in terms of where different privacy definitions/frameworks might find a different balance to what we have already. I am also a member of the ELLIS PhD Program, and so co-supervised by Amartya Sanyal at the University of Copenhagen.

Projects Notes

Visiting Copenhagen

I am visiting Amartya Sanyal’s group at the Datalogisk Institute at UCPH for the next 3 months. I’m obviously looking forward to working with Amartya, and also to cycling around Copenhagen and enjoying the summer.

ELSA Privacy Workshop

I had a very nice week in Bertinoro, Italy at the ELSA Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning workshop, with lots of interesting talks and a great opportunity to meet students and professors from around the world.

Passed my Qualifying Exam

I presented my PhD project proposal, and passed a small viva on research papers relevant to my topic.

Affiliated!

have affiliated with Prof. Christoph Lampert at ISTA! Over the next few months, I’ll be working towards the qualifying exam (defending my PhD proposal).

Starting my PhD

I have started my PhD at ISTA! I’m looking forward to working with 3 different professors over the next year, to broaden my ML horizons, and conversely, to hone in on a topic and affiliate with one of them for the rest of my time as ISTA.

Graduated!

I graduated from Oxford! I recieved a First (years 1-3; Bachelor’s) and a Distinction (4th year; Master’s) in my integrated MMMathCompSci degree in Mathematics and Computer Science.