Brown CS News

The Fulbright Program’s 2023-2024 year saw Brown University students and alums earn 36 Fulbright scholarships, the second-highest number in the nation. One of them, Bill Marino, is a recent recipient of Brown’s Master of Science in Cybersecurity, a fully online degree program that can be completed from anywhere in the world.

“One of my favorite aspects of our program is that our students have the ability to participate in many of the same opportunities as Brown’s in-residence students,” said Brown CS faculty member Ernesto Zaldivar, co-founder of Brown’s Master of Science in Cybersecurity, and Co-Chair of the program’s Executive Committee. “During his time at Brown, Bill sought out every opportunity to fully engage with the university’s highly interdisciplinary academic community. He collaborated with a different department’s research center to host a timely in-person mini-summit on AI, he completed independent research with two CS faculty members, and he was an enthusiastic participant at in-person community-building events for the Master of Science in Cybersecurity program, where he nurtured his friendships with classmates and faculty.”

Prior to his arrival at Brown, Bill practiced law and worked in applied artificial intelligence (AI) at Adobe, where he ultimately served as Principal Project Manager for Neural Filters, the company’s machine learning-powered content generation software. He was the co-founder and CEO of video AI startup Uru, which was acquired by Adobe. 

“Many congratulations to Bill for his award of a Fulbright scholarship. I had the privilege of receiving a Fulbright award earlier in my career, and I encourage students to apply to this wonderful program,” says Deborah Hurley, Director of Graduate Studies of the Master of Science in Cybersecurity program. “Due to their commitments to interdisciplinarity, Brown and our Cybersecurity Master’s program enable students to pursue their passions and make unique contributions. Bill seized this opportunity. Building upon his already considerable skills, he deepened his expertise at Brown and has positioned himself to continue to provide insights and solutions in our field.”

While pursuing his Master of Science in Cybersecurity, Bill conducted an independent study with Brown CS faculty member James Tompkin, developing a first-of-its-kind, comprehensive taxonomy of generative machine learning-powered cyberattacks. He also completed an independent study with Brown CS faculty member Ellie Pavlick, looking at how federated learning can be used to preserve the privacy of large language model training data.

“The Master of Science in Cybersecurity program,” Bill says, “allowed me to shore up my foundational security knowledge while also delving deeper into my own particular area of interest: the intersection of AI and security. On top of all that, I was able to complete Brown's one-of-a-kind Sheridan Teaching Seminar, which profoundly shaped the development of a ‘Productizing Machine Learning’ graduate course that I now teach at Cornell Tech.”

Bill regretfully declined the award in order to pursue a PhD in computer science at the University of Cambridge, thus making him a Fulbright Finalist. He’s currently part of the Cambridge Machine Learning Systems Lab, supervised by Professor Nicholas Lane and Professor Ross Anderson, an expert in security. Bill is also a Student Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, a Visiting Lecturer at Cornell University, and serves on the board of Kenya Connect, which builds education centers in rural Kenya. 

At Cambridge, Bill’s research is currently focused on keeping AI secure, responsible, and regulation-compliant while it’s applied to real-world use cases. One of his recent projects discusses how federated learning may have to reprioritize in the wake of the EU AI Act.

A full list of Brown’s 2023-2024 Fulbright scholarship winners is available here.

For more information, click the link that follows to contact Brown CS Communications Manager Jesse C. Polhemus.