MIRI’s research team is growing! I’m happy to announce that we’ve hired two new research fellows to contribute to our work on AI alignment: Sam Eisenstat and Marcello Herreshoff, both from Google.

Sam Eisenstat studied pure mathematics at the University of Waterloo, where he carried out research in mathematical logic. His previous work was on the automatic construction of deep learning models at Google.

Sam’s research focus is on questions relating to the foundations of reasoning and agency, and he is especially interested in exploring analogies between current theories of logical uncertainty and Bayesian reasoning. He has also done work on decision theory and counterfactuals. His past work with MIRI includes “Asymptotic Decision Theory,” “A Limit-Computable, Self-Reflective Distribution,” and “A Counterexample to an Informal Conjecture on Proof Length and Logical Counterfactuals.”

Marcello Herreshoff studied at Stanford, receiving a B.S. in Mathematics with Honors and getting two honorable mentions in the Putnam Competition, the world’s most highly regarded university-level math competition. Marcello then spent five years as a software engineer at Google, gaining a background in machine learning.

Marcello is one of MIRI’s earliest research collaborators, and attended our very first research workshop alongside Eliezer Yudkowsky, Paul Christiano, and Mihály Bárász. Marcello has worked with us in the past to help produce results such as “Program Equilibrium in the Prisoner’s Dilemma via Löb’s Theorem,” “Definability of Truth in Probabilistic Logic,” and “Tiling Agents for Self-Modifying AI.” His research interests include logical uncertainty and the design of reflective agents.

Sam and Marcello will be starting with us in the first two weeks of April. This marks the beginning of our first wave of new research fellowships since 2015, though we more recently added Ryan Carey to the team on an assistant research fellowship (in mid-2016).

We have additional plans to expand our research team in the coming months, and will soon be hiring for a more diverse set of technical roles at MIRI — details forthcoming!