Brian Formento
Hi! I'm Brian Formento, a Research Associate at Imperial College London working with Prof. Alessio Lomuscio in the Department of Computing. Previously, I completed a PhD in the School of Computer Science at the National University of Singapore, doing research in the exciting field of adversarial robustness on deep learning! I was a recipient of the SINGA scholarship and under the supervision of Professor See-Kiong Ng, Dr. Chen Zhenghua, and Dr. Chuan Sheng Foo. Before Singapore, I graduated with a MEng in electronic engineering from the University of Southampton. I was originally born in Turin Italy and moved to England at a young age, where I lived across the country, predominantly Reading, Bath, Portsmouth and Birmingham. I'm passionate about deep learning, machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision, and web development.
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Projects
EyeCam:
A tool to help medical practitioners with chronic kidney disease diagnosis using retinal fundus photography
Quadcopters:
Two projects related to quadcopter system designInternships
L3 Harris, ASV:
Redesigned the electrical distribution system on one of ASV's autonomous boats.
Roke Mannor Resarch:
I worked in Roke's signal processing department, where I assisted in the implementation of an internally researched signal processing algorithm. I utilized Matlab, C, and Python.
Publications
Brian Formento, Chuan Sheng Foo, See-Kiong Ng, Confidence Elicitation: A New Attack Vector for Large Language Models, International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR, Poster), Singapore, 2025
Brian Formento,Wenjie Feng, Chuan Sheng Foo, Luu Anh Tuan, See-Kiong Ng, SemRoDe: Macro Adversarial Training to Learn Representations That are Robust to Word-Level Attacks, North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL, Main Track, Oral), Mexico City, 2024
Brian Formento, Chuan Sheng Foo, Luu Anh Tuan, See-Kiong Ng, Using Punctuation as an Adversarial Attack on Deep Learning Based NLP Systems: An Empirical Study, European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL, Findings), Dubrovnik, Croatia, 2023
Brian Formento, See-Kiong Ng, Chuan Sheng Foo, Special symbol attacks on NLP, IEEE International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN), Shenzen, China, 2021
Hackathons
Aria and Personal Timeline Workshop at Meta Menlo Park 2023 (3 days)
We were flown in to participate and built an AR & AI-augmented fashion app.
LLM Bio Hackathon 2023 (3 days)
Organized by Dr. Jonathan Rothberg on his personal yacht (Gene Chaser), during his visit to Singapore. We developed an app designed to train healthcare practitioners in underdeveloped countries to recognize markers of cancerous diseases. Utilizing stable diffusion, the app transforms a healthy ultrasound image to simulate its cancerous counterpart.
F10 Hackathon 2019
Held at the PwC headquarters in Singapore. In their video, you'll see me working hard at timestamp 2.40
Yitu Hackathon 2019
My team won SGD 300, and we presented our final project at their headquarters in Singapore.
Other Hackathos
I have also participated in numerous other hackathons, primarily across England, including ICHack 2017 at Imperial College London, Hack the Holidays, and SotonHack in Southampton on two occasions.
