Stephen Casper (Cas)
I (Cas) work on a range of projects from technical safeguards to technical governance. This stream follows an academic collaboration model and will work will likely focus on technical topics in AI governance.
Stream overview
Technical work: Making safeguards 'run deep', including safeguards and risk management for open-weight models.
Governance work: Critical review of industry self-governance, critical review of national AI governance institutes, open-weight model governance, predicting and mitigating future AI incidents.
Mentors
Stephen (“Cas”) Casper) is a computer scientist and Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. He has formerly worked at MIT and the UK AI Security Institute. His work focuses on AI safeguards and technical governance. His research has been featured at NeurIPS, AAAI, Nature, FAccT, EMNLP, SaTML, TMLR, IASEAI, several course curricula, a number of workshops, and over 20 news articles and newsletters. He is also a writer for the International AI Safety Report and the Singapore Consensus. In addition to MATS, he also mentors for ERA and GovAI. In the past, he has worked closely with over 30 mentees on AI safety- and governance-related research projects.
Mentorship style
2-3 meetings per week plus regular messaging and collaborative writing.
Fellows we are looking for
Green flags include:
- Research experience and taste
- Demonstrated initiative in ideating and leading prior projects
- Demonstrated ability to 'succeed even when not set up to succeed' in past research/projects.
- Taking a critical mindset about projects and impact
- Interest in academia
This stream will follow an academic collaboration model. Scholars will be free to discuss and collaborate externally. However, scholars should also expect to work in collaboration with others in the stream.
Project selection
Mentor(s) will talk through project ideas with scholar.