July 2015 Newsletter

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Hello, all! I’m Rob Bensinger, MIRI’s Outreach Coordinator. I’ll be keeping you updated on MIRI’s activities and on relevant news items. If you have feedback or questions, you can get in touch with me by email.

Research updates

 
General updates

  • Our team is growing! If you are interested in joining us, click through to see our Office Manager job posting.
  • This was Nate Soares’ first month as our Executive Director. We have big plans in store for the next two months, which Nate has begun laying out here: fundraising thoughts.
  • MIRI has been awarded a $250,000 grant from the Future of Life Institute spanning three years to make headway on our research agenda. This will fund three workshops and several researcher-years of work on a number of open technical problems. MIRI has also been awarded a $49,310 FLI grant to fund strategy research at AI Impacts.
  • Owain Evans of the Future of Humanity Institute, in collaboration with new MIRI hire Jessica Taylor, has been awarded a $227,212 FLI grant to develop algorithms that learn human preferences from behavioral data in the presence of irrational and otherwise suboptimal behavior.
  • Cambridge computational logician Ramana Kumar and MIRI research fellow Benja Fallenstein have been awarded a $36,750 FLI grant to study self-referential reasoning in HOL (higher-order logic) proof assistants.
  • Stuart Russell, co-author of the standard textbook on artificial intelligence, has become a MIRI research advisor.
  • Nate and Stuart Russell participated in a panel discussion about AI risk at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, one of the world's leading public policy think tanks: video.
  • On the Effective Altruism Forum, Nate answered a large number of questions about MIRI's strategy and priorities. Excerpts here.

 
News and links