Looking for machine learning and computer science collaborators

Hi Stuart. I am not an ML person, and I am not close to Oxford, but I am interested in this type of stuff (in particular, I went through the FDT paper just two days ago with someone). I do write papers for ML conferences sometimes.

Hi Stuart, I am about to complete a PhD in Machine Learning and would be interested in collaborations like these but only October onwards.

I have written and presented papers at Machine Learning conferences, and am quite interested in contributing to concrete AI safety research. My work so far has been on issues in supervised ranking tasks, but I have read a fair bit on reinforcement learning.

I am not close to Oxford. I am current in Austin, TX and will be in the bay area October onwards.

I might be able to collaborate. I have a masters in computer science and did a thesis on neural networks and object recognition, before spending some time at a startup as a data scientist doing mostly natural language related machine learning stuff, and then getting a job as a research scientist at a larger company to do similar applied research work.

I also have two published conference papers under my belt, though they were in pretty obscure conferences admittedly.

As a plus, I've also read most of the sequences and am familiar with the Less Wrong culture, and have spent a fair bit of time thinking about the Friendly/Unfriendly AI problem. I even came up with an attempt at a thought experiment to convince an AI to be friendly.

Alas, I am based near Toronto, Ontario, Canada, so distance might be an issue.

Consider for a moment, that this DL thing may be soon obsolete. It is great, the best so far, but anyway.

The first problem I have with it is the enormous data set needed for training.

The second problem is the inherent non-understandability of what those weights mean.

So, perhaps something better may be just around the corner.