Aalto University’s new Assistant Professor Sebastian Szyller will give a HAIC Talk “Pinky Promise or Ironclad: Guarantees in Trustworthy Machine Learning” on Monday, 16 March, in Dipoli.
Lecture description: Cryptography is built on a mathematical bedrock — security guarantees that hold under well-defined assumptions that break only when violated. Similarly, differential privacy shows what a rigorous guarantee looks like: a formal, quantifiable bound on privacy loss that holds adversarially and composes predictably. Without differential privacy, many common privacy-preserving techniques offer no worst-case guarantees. Their protection depends on empirical evaluations that are necessarily incomplete.
“Through this lens, I will discuss where trustworthy ML stands today — why the current empirical paradigm falls short for regulators, policymakers, and engineers deploying machine learning in high-risk settings. I’ll discuss what a path towards stronger guarantees might look like, and the work being done to get there.”
About the speaker: Sebastian Szyller is a recently appointed assistant professor at Aalto University where he leads the Trustworthy & Adversarial Computing Lab. He obtained his PhD from Aalto University in 2023 which was recognised with the Aalto Distinguished Dissertation Award and the Finnish AI Society Best Dissertation Award. His research sits at the intersection of machine learning, and security and privacy — particularly model provenance and the formal foundations of trustworthy machine learning, with a focus on quantifiable guarantees and worst-case analysis. Prior to his current role, Sebastian was a research scientist at Intel Labs, where his work on provenance contributed to the C2PA standard. Across academia and industry, he has been working on trustworthy machine learning for ten years.
Time: 16.3.2026 at 16:00 – 17:30 (coffee and buns served from 15:30). The lecture will be approximately 60 minutes, after which there will be time for questions.
Venue: Lumituuli auditorium, Dipoli, Aalto University (Otakaari 24, Espoo).
Registration: The event is open to all and free of charge but we ask you to register for the event as it will help us to estimate the number of coffee ordered, thank you!
HAIC talks are arranged in the Lumituuli auditorium which is located next to the Pinecone entrance of Dipoli building. Photo by Kesara Gamlath.