Chris Summerfield

great opportunity to work with Marco using exciting new methods!

it must be for all those gold plated taps in the bathroom

in Oxford, a grade 7 (entry-level) postdoc costs about £180K for 3 years, including fringe. For UKRI grants, the university now adds **£460K** in overheads. is that normal? do other UK universities impose such outlandish FEC?

perhaps you'd find this interesting / useful
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Research Agenda View AISI grants. The AI Security Institute is a directorate of the Department of Science, Innovation, and Technology that facilitates rigorous research to enable advanced AI governance.

AISI has published its research agenda...
www.aisi.gov.uk/research-age...
There is so much amazing work going on at AISI. Expect much more in the way of published outputs over the coming months!

Increasing happiness through conversations with artificial intelligence Chatbots powered by artificial intelligence (AI) have rapidly become a significant part of everyday life, with over a quarter of American adults using them multiple times per week. While these tools o...

I am SO excited to share my latest #preprint with
@robbrutledge.bsky.social, Chongyu Qin, Zeb Kurth-Nelson, Martin Chadwick, @summerfieldlab.bsky.social, and others from DeepMind:
"Increasing happiness through conversations with artificial intelligence"
arxiv.org/abs/2504.02091

A short 🧵
1/7

Deep reinforcement learning can promote sustainable human behaviour in a common-pool resource problem - Nature Communications Koster et al introduce a deep reinforcement learning (RL) mechanism designed to manage common-pool resources successfully encourages sustainable cooperation among human participants by dynamically adj...

getting this paper published was a bit painful but I am proud of it: www.nature.com/articles/s41.... We use deep RL to find mechanisms that help (real) people sustain the commons. Well done to Raphael Koster and Miruna Pislar (not on BlueSky). non-paywalled version on arxiv.

Coming of Age Adolescence is the most misunderstood period of our lives. Coming of Age draws on a decade of expert research to get beneath the stereotypes, expose the myths and reveal the real reasons why teens beh...

I really, really enjoyed Coming of Age by @lucyfoulkes.bsky.social. it's wise and poignant in equal measure. tinyurl.com/4e82na8v.

thank you! well I am not sure the jokes in the book are any better than yours :) but I appreciate it

I'm not sure how to interpret this comment but I'm going to just assume that it's a compliment

thank you Nicole! I really appreciate it. also really looking forward to reading your book...!

US version. thank you very much @vikingbooks.bsky.social. I like the black cover more!

Amazing - there is still at least one senior academic who is not afraid to tell it how it is!

Thank you Ali!!!

Thank you so much Rebecca! it's been such a pleasure to work with you.

These Strange New Minds Stunning advances in digital technology have given us a new wave of disarmingly human-like AI systems. The march of this new technology is set to upturn our economies, challenge our democracies, and r...

I am a bit bashful about sharing this profile www.thetimes.com/uk/technolog... of me in @thetimes.com, but will do so because it kindly refers to my new book which is coming out in early March. www.penguin.co.uk/books/460891.... The tech titans pictured seem to be decoration (and not my co-authors)

New paper led by the unstoppable @qingtianmi.bsky.social. We study how people learn a task that involves combining multiple sources of information. We work out which curricula work best, build a model, and use it to successfully discover new curricula. enjoy! osf.io/preprints/ps...

BAMB! is happening again in 2025. Learn how to model your behavioural data, next to the beach in Barcelona! keynotes this year from @athenaakrami.bsky.social and Peter Dayan.

(1/5) Very excited to announce the publication of Bayesian Models of Cognition: Reverse Engineering the Mind. More than a decade in the making, it's a big (600+ pages) beautiful book covering both the basics and recent work: mitpress.mit.edu/978026204941...

a CS department of a very prominent US university just asked me to write a reference letter for a candidate that they are *planning on* attempting to headhunt from a major tech firm, but whom they have not actually contacted yet. Is that a thing?? what a waste of everyone's time!

thanks for your interest Pete! yes, we're exploring a number of potential use cases. Also, the experiments that @michaelhogan.bsky.social suggests are absolutely top of our list of for any future research. I don't know much about Interactive Management - will take a look.

yes, that's work conducted by my team at DeepMind before I left at the end of 2023.

I never fail to learn something from Mark's excellent round up! thank you for doing this :)

@dickretired.bsky.social
here already. and definitely not retired

I think there's an expectation of at least some office time but it's flexible

thanks for flagging

Research Scientist for Computational Social Science - AI Safety Institute - Civil Service Jobs - GOV... Search and apply for jobs in the UK Civil Service

sorry no idea why those links dont work!!
here's another try
www.civilservicejobs.service.gov.uk/csr/jobs.cgi...
and
www.civilservicejobs.service.gov.uk/csr/jobs.cgi...

new researcher positions at UK AI Safety Institute! a behavioural / cognitive scientist with AI research experience civilservicejobs.service.gov.uk/csr/jobs.cgi... and a computational social scientist civilservicejobs.service.gov.uk/csr/jobs.cgi... to work on the social / psychological impacts of AI

Research Scientist, Engineer and many other roles advertised at UK AI Safety Institute. tinyurl.com/5t32h2p6
Come and work at the cutting edge of AI research from within government! Message me if you want more information. Coming soon: more roles with cog sci / computational social science focus.

Open letter to the Society for Neuroscience leadership (led by Rich Ivry) regarding the climate impact of the annual meeting: bit.ly/LetterToSfNL...