News
Welcome to my academic weblog. Here I share news about my career and my research, and related topics. I occasionally link to longer articles reflecting upon certain research projects and personal projects.
Coming soon
May:
- I’m giving a guest lecture on ethics and the future of AI at the University of Melbourne in late May (time/date TBC).
June:
- I’m planning Hi, JAX!, a free online introductory JAX course for June/July/August.
2024
February:
- Together with collaborators from Melbourne and Timaeus I published a preprint on arXiv: “The developmental landscape of in-context learning”.
2023
December:
- I attended NeurIPS 2023 in New Orleans.
November:
- I attended the 2023 Developmental Interpretability Conference at Wytham Abbey, Oxford.
October:
- I led a virtual workshop on using TPU virtual machines to accelerate machine learning research, for people without experience using a VM. A recording is available.
September:
- The first of two papers based on the results in my Master’s thesis was accepted for poster presentation at NeurIPS 2023: “Functional equivalence and path connectivity of reducible hyperbolic tangent networks”.
- I moved to Cambridge, UK, to work for three months as an RA in David Krueger’s AI safety lab, working with Usman Anwar on understanding goal misgeneralisation.
August:
- I got a grant to work on independent AI safety research for six weeks. I shared some of my progress in a standalone blog: Seven Saturdays with Singular Learning Theory. Though the grant has expired, work for this project is ongoing.
July:
- I attended my first machine learning conference: ICML 2023, in
Honolulu, Hawai’i.
- I presented the results of my 2021 CHAI internship, in reward learning theory, together with co-authors Adam Gleave and Joar Skalse.
- I was interviewed by Michaël Trazzi for The Inside View. [youtube, ~8 minutes]
- I finished my RA contract with Tim Miller at the University of Melbourne.
- I participated in the Australian Government’s consultation
on safe and responsible AI in Australia.
- I signed the open letter “Australians for AI Safety” drafted by the Good Ancestors Policy team for submission to the consultation.
- I also wrote my own open letter for submission to the consultation.
June:
- I attended the inaugural Singular Learning Theory
& Alignment Summit, in Berkeley, California.
- I presented a talk on the results of my thesis: “Hidden unit acrobatics: An introduction to swaps, flips, and other symmetries of singular networks and their applications”. [youtube, 45 minutes] [interactive notebook]
- I published another preprint on arXiv, based on the second of the two major results in my Master’s thesis: “Computational complexity of detecting proximity to losslessly compressible neural network parameters”.
May:
- “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.” I support the above Statement on AI Risk from the Center for AI Safety. I attempted to sign the statement officially, but my singature is not listed, perhaps because my I was considered insufficiently notable as a research assistant.
- I published a preprint on arXiv, based on one of the two major results in my Master’s thesis: “Functional equivalence and path connectivity of reducible hyperbolic tangent networks”.
April:
- The paper from my 2021 virtual CHAI internship was accepted at ICML 2023: “Invariance in policy optimization and partial identifiability in reward learning”.
March:
- I was one of the initial signatories to the Future of Life Institute’s open letter calling to Pause Giant AI Experiments.
February:
- I joined the teaching team for COMP90087 The Ethics of Artificial Inteligence for semester 1, 2023.
January:
- I started a 6-month contract as an RA in Tim Miller’s explainable AI lab at the University of Melbourne.
- I attended metauni’s Festival 2023.
- I gave a talk entitled “Considering a Career in AI Safety”. [youtube]
2022
December:
- I finally graduated from my Master of Computer Science degree at the University of Melbourne.
November:
- I gave several talks on my Master’s thesis results at the metauni SLT seminar.
October:
- I submitted my minor thesis on structural degeneracy in neural networks to the School of Computing and Information Systems at the University of Melbourne.
July:
- Our full paper “Teaching simple constructive proofs with Haskell programs” from TFPIE 2022 was accepted for publication in the official EPTCS proceedings.
- Our paper “Programming to learn: logic and computation from a programming perspective” was presented at ITiCSE 2022 in Dublin, Ireland, by my co-author Bryn Jeffries.
- I married Annie-Emma Jean Italiano.
May:
- I finally made a personal web site. (I didn’t want to let myself graduate from my second computer science degree without one.) The website is written in markdown, compiled to HTML with pandoc, styled with hand-made CSS, and hosted with GitHub pages.
March:
- I attended TFPIE 2022, a
virtual conference hosted in Kraków, Poland.
- I presented our extended abstract “Teaching simple constructive proofs with Haskell programs” with my co-author Harald Søndergaard.