PERFECTLY NORMAL

My Research / Projects

Mechanistic Interpretability

Open-Source Code

AI Safety (general)

A Little About Me

Maths

Productivity & Learning

Experience

ARENA (Alignment Research Engineer Accelerator) | Cofounder

• Founded & ran the first and second iterations of ARENA (with Kathryn O'Rourke as head of operations)
• Acted as head TA and curriculum designer for the majority of the program
• Main roles included:
• • Assisting participants with conceptual and engineering questions
  • Structuring the micro and macro-level details of the curriculum
  • Giving several talks and organizing group discussions
  • Providing feedback and advice to groups while they were working on capstone projects
• Created materials for people studying the program virtually, including a monthly series of mechanistic interpretability challenges
• Designed our public-facing website here, and the website for hosting the curriculum here (which now has over 2000 unique visitors)

SERI MATS | Scholar

• Accepted into Neel Nanda's Mechanistic Interpretability SERI MATS stream with Arthur Conmy, studying negative attention heads in GPT2-Small
• Developed a form of ablation which demonstrates that a particular mechanism (copy suppression) explains the majority of head L10H7's behaviour in GPT2-Small, and reoccurs as a motif in larger models
• Wrote a paper on which I will be first author (a draft will be available on 27th October)

MLAB | Participant

• Attended MLAB (Machine Learning For Alignment Bootcamp), run by Redwood Research
• Created Anki flashcards to summarise the material studied during the bootcamp (TODO - link to flashcards)

AI Safety Camp | Participant

• Working in a team of three, researching selection for modularity in evolved systems & modern deep learning
• Have given several summary talks on our team's progress
• Link to LessWrong sequence can be found here

SERI MATS | Scholar

• Attended weekly discussions with Evan Hubinger to discuss his research agenda, and his views on alignment
• Wrote up a distillation of John Wentworth's Natural Abstraction Hypothesis, linking it to other topics such as interpretability research and neuroscience (link here)
• • This distillation was featured for a time as part of the AGISF 201 course

Cambridge Existential Risks Initiative | Committee member

• Designed syllabus & organised an introductory course on existential risks (ERIC)
• Gave Q&A on AI Safety at the CERI 2021 retreat
• Co-lead a reading group on Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control

Jane Street Capital | Quantitative Trading Intern

• Participated in team-based mock trading sessions
• Developed methods for interactive visualisation of the results of a Gradient Boosted Tree in Python
• Received a full-time offer as a trader

Effective Altruism, Cambridge | Faciliator

• Facilitated the Effective Altruism Introductory Fellowship for two groups of Cambridge residents
• Helped to promote discussion of important topics, and helped fellows to engage with ideas

Projects

Computational Thread Art

• Created a Python programme which renders images as a series of lines between nodes, joined by a Eulerian path
• Experimented with different search depths to improve performance
• Designed a custom loss function to enhance accuracy in specific regions of the image (full code on GitHub)
• Physically created these pieces using bike wheels & coloured thread
• Built and programmed a robotic gantry system to automate the threading
• Designed a website to feature this art, using Django & Heroku
• Also built a professional website for sales

Education

University of Cambridge | MMath

• Year 3: Class I [rank 11/222], Year 2: Class I [honorary], Year 1: Class I [rank 38/232]
• Awards: Dr J.A.J. Whelan Prize in Mathematics, Christ's College Academic Scholarship (1st, 2nd, 3rd & 4th years)
• Courses: Statistics, Optimisation, Applied Probability, Automata & Formal Languages, Logic & Set Theory

Westminster School

• STEP: S, S (“Outstanding”) grades in papers II and III (top 15 in the country)
• A Levels: Maths (A*), Further Maths (A*), Economics (A*), Physics (D1, equivalent to high A*)
• UKMT: Certificate of Distinction in 2nd round of British Mathematical Olympiad (top 25 of 30,000 students)
• Senior Cheyne Prize for Mathematical Excellence (awarded to one senior student annually)
• Subject prizes in Maths & English
• Participated in the Greaze, won exactly zero pancake

Misc.

Guinness World Record Holder

• Current holder of the world record for most clothes pegs removed from a line and held in one hand
• Yes, really.