Earlier this year, MIT CSAIL MEng student Jack Cook ‘22 and undergraduate student Matthew Kearney were named 2023 Rhodes Scholars, fully funding their postgraduate studies at Oxford University next fall. Rhodes awards 32 United States citizens with the honor annually, while also awarding scholarships to citizens from non-U.S. constituencies.
Cook is a master’s student who recently graduated with a major in computer science and a minor in brain and cognitive sciences. In the future, he plans to apply his technical skills to addressing misinformation. Kearney is majoring in both electrical engineering and computer science and philosophy. Passionate about artificial intelligence ethics, his goal is to redesign AI technologies and practices to address their harms and reimagine them as tools for solutions to urgent social issues, including climate change and economic inequality.
Cook worked with CSAIL as a member of Mengjia Yan’s lab. He was the lead author of “There’s Always a Bigger Fish,” a paper exposing how machine learning can be weaponized in side-channel attacks to steal private information. Additionally, Cook was the director of HackMIT for two years, interned at NVIDIA research, and was a member of Mixer’s founding team before it was acquired by Microsoft in 2016. He is currently working on his master’s thesis in partnership with Lahey Hospital, building a digital cognitive assessment for diagnosing patients with neurodegenerative diseases.
Kearney is working on computer vision for 3D scene understanding and explainability methods for natural language models at CSAIL. He also researched probabilistic climate downscaling at the Human Systems Lab and theoretical quantum computing with the Quanta Research Group. Kearney interned at Argo AI, an autonomous vehicle company, and Google X, the moonshot factory of Google.
For both, the award is yet another academic achievement: Cook received MIT’s 2022 Robert M. Fano UROP Award for his paper on side-channel attacks, while Kearney was previously recognized as an MIT Burchard Scholar for his work in the humanities. Kearney also developed a project focused on effective climate change solutions, for which he and his co-founder received the PKG Fellowship and the IDEAS Fellowship.
Cook and Kearney are among three MIT students selected into the Rhodes Scholarship program this year. At Oxford, Cook plans to earn an MSc in the social science of the internet and an MSc in evidence-based social intervention and policy evaluation, while Kearney will pursue an MSc in research in statistics.
