Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Announcing the 2023 PIBBSS Summer Research Fellowship, published by Nora Ammann on January 12, 2023 on The AI Alignment Forum.

What can we learn from biological and social systems about designing beneficial AI systems?

We are, once again, pleased to announce the PIBBSS Research Fellowship program.

Principles of Intelligent Behavior in Biological and Social Systems (PIBBSS) aims to facilitate research on parallels between intelligent behaviour in natural and artificial systems and to leverage these insights towards the goal of building safe and aligned AI.

Last year, we welcomed 20 fellows from fields as diverse as computational neuroscience, evolutionary biology, complex systems studies and the humanities. Over the course of three months, supported by two research retreats in Oxford and Prague, shared office space for the cohort, and mentorship from experienced AI alignment researchers, fellows worked on a range of projects with the purpose of bringing interdisciplinary expertise to AI safety. We were overall pleased with the results and thus decided to organize a second iteration of the program.

If you’re interested in the program, learn more and apply here.

Application deadline: Feb 5th, 2023, 23:59 CET

We are running to information sessions if you want to learn more or want to ask us questions:

1st information session: 28th of January, 17:00 UTC (09:00 PST, 12:00 EST, 18:00 CET, 01:00 [29th of Jan] Singapore) - Zoom Link

2nd information session: 29th of January, 11:00 UTC (03:00 PST, 06:00 EST, 12:00 CET, 19:00 Singapore) - Zoom Link

We are grateful for any help to pass on the word to people who might be interested in applying. At this link you can find all the information about the program in several forms (Twitter length, short description, medium description), so you can copy-paste the version from there you find most useful.

For more information, see:

Our website: PIBBSS.ai

A general introduction to PIBBSS, see: Introducing the Principles of Intelligent Behaviour in Biological and Social Systems (PIBBSS) Fellowship

A discusison of the epistemic bet PIBBSS is aiming to foster, see: AI alignment as “navigating the space of intelligent behaviour” (see section 3 in particular)

A brief retrospective on last year’s fellowship program

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