Looking for Spanish AI Alignment Researchers

post by Antb (darustc4) · 2023-01-07T18:52:08.375Z · LW · GW · 3 comments

I am fairly new to the AI alignment/safety community and I am looking to step up my game by getting a Ph.D. in the field. Problem is, I have not found any academic AI alignment research activity here in Spain, where I currently live.

I am aware that this community is largely based on the States and the UK, but it would be far too difficult for me to move there for a wide variety of reasons, and so I am instead trying to exhaust all local possibilities I have available before turning my life upside-down.

I am interested in just about any alignment research, but my speciality is software security, BCI and computational neuroscience. Contact me if you're interested in having a collaborator/sparring partner/mentee or simply someone to talk about AI stuff.

Let's get to making AI alignment an international movement ;)

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comment by Shoshannah Tekofsky (DarkSym) · 2023-01-07T22:01:22.622Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

There is an EU telegram group where they are, among other things, collecting data on where people are in Europe. I'll DM an invite.

comment by PabloAMC · 2023-01-08T17:04:13.078Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Hey Antb, I'm Pablo, Spanish and based in Spain. As far as I know these are the following AI Safety researchers:

  • Jaime Sevilla leads the organization Epoch AI, mostly interested in forecasting AI.
  • Juan Rocamonde and Adrià Garriga work full time on AI alignment in FAR.ai and Redwood Research.
  • There is a professor, called Jose Hernández Orallo, working between Cambridge and Valencia who has been for quite a while in AI Safety. I know him and he is an excellent researcher. Part of the existential AI Safety FLI community, and mostly interested in measuring intelligence.
  • There are also a couple of other professors at the Carlos III university in Madrid who could be friendly to these topics (see eg https://e-archivo.uc3m.es/handle/10016/29354), but it is unclear to what extent they would put this as their main research field.
  • I work part-time as a science communicator in FAR.ai

In summary: if you want to stay in Spain probably you should go to Jose's group. I am happy to introduce you to Jose, with whom I did an internship a year and a half ago. We also have a Spanish-speaking EA community in case you're interested. Hope this is useful.

Replies from: Jsevillamol
↑ comment by Jsevillamol · 2023-01-09T15:38:45.055Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

If you want to join the Spanish-speaking EA community, you can do so through this link!