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by Dušan D. Nešić (Dushan)
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Tl;dr

We are pleased to invite you to the second PIBBSS Symposium, where the fellows from the ‘24  fellowship program present their work. 

The symposium is taking place online, over several days in the week of September 9th. 

  • Check out the full program, including brief descriptions for each talk. (You can toggle between the different days.)
  • Register via this link. You will receive an email with the event link which you can use for the entire symposium. You will be able to drop into as few or as many presentations and breakout sessions as you like. 
  • Click here to add the schedule to your google calendar.

About PIBBSS

PIBBSS is a research initiative aiming  to explore parallels between intelligent behavior in natural and artificial systems, and to leverage these insights towards the goal of building safe and aligned AI. 

During June-August ‘24, we ran the second iteration of our 3-month research fellowship program. The symposium acts as a venue to share research conducted as part of this program. You can read about the last year symposium here, or watch recordings here.

About the symposium 

The PIBBSS Summer Symposium is a multi-day event where PIBBSS fellows present their work.  

The event is taking place on the days of Tuesday - Friday, Sept 10th - 13th, between 17:00-~21:00 GMT / 9:00 - 12:00 PT / 12:00 - 15:00 ET.

The event is set it up such that you can easily join whichever talks and breakout sessions you are most interesting in.

The program 

Find a program overview here. 

Find the full program here, including brief descriptions of each talk. 

On top of the talks, there will also be opportunities to continue the discussion with fellows at the end of each block in speaker-specific breakout rooms.

Talks span a wide range of topics in line with PIBBSS’s research mission. Some representative examples of topics include: 

  • novel avenues for interpretability 
  • naturalistic approaches to understanding the nature and emergence of agency and goal-directed behavior
  • attempts to develop a principled understanding of the dynamics emerging from multi-agent interactions in and across AI/LLM systems
  • analyses of the space of AI risks — from single to multiple agents, from misuse to structural risks, etc.
  • exploration of the potential and limits of existing legal tools for reducing catastrophic risks from AI 
  • ..and more!

The format

The symposium is taking place over the course of four days, in blocks of ~4 fellows. 

Each fellow presents for a total of 30 minutes, including some time for questions. 

At the end of each block, there will be speaker-specific break-out rooms to allow for further questions and discussions.

Example day: 

Day 1Starting time
Speaker 1  17:00 GMT          
Speaker 2  18:00 GMT
Speaker 3  19:00 GMT
Breakout/Discussion Rooms 
with Speakers 1-3 (in parallel)     		  20:00 GMT

How to engage

Register here to receive a link to the webinar. 

The same link works for the entire symposium. This allows you to tune in for exactly those talks and breakout sessions you’re most interested in!

If you cannot make it to a talk, worry not! Most talks will be recorded and can later be viewed at the PIBBSS YouTube Page.

Talks (overview)

For a full version of the agenda, including talk descriptions, see here. The times below are in GMT.

Tuesday, Sep 10th

17:00 - Solvable models of in-context learning - Nischal Mainali
18:00 - Factored Space Models: Causality Between Levels of Abstraction - Magdalena Wache
19:00 - Fixing our concepts to understand minds and agency: preliminary results - Mateusz Bagiński
20:00 - Break out session with the speakers

Wednesday, Sep 11th

17:00 - Features that Fire Together Wire Together: Examining Co-occurence of SAE
Features - Matthew A. Clarke
18:00 - Minimum Description Length for singular models - Yevgeny Liokumovich
19:00 - Are Neuro-Symbolic Approaches the Path to Safe LLM-Based Agents? - Agustín
Martinez-Suñé
20:00 - Heavy-tailed Noise & Stochastic Gradient Descent - Wesley Erickson
21:00 - Break out session with the speakers

Thursday, Sep 12th

17:00 - Exploring the potential of formal approaches to emergence for AI safety - Nadine Spychala
18:00 - What I've learned as a PIBBSS fellow, and what I plan to do with it - Shaun Raviv
19:00 - Searching for indicators of phenomenal consciousness in LLMs: Metacognition & higher-order theory - Euan McLean
20:00 - Break out session with the speakers

Friday, Sep 13th

17:00 - Dynamics of LLM beliefs during chain-of-thought reasoning - Baram Sosis
18:00 - Cultural Evolution of Cooperation in LLMs - Aron Vallinder
19:00 - The geometry of in-context learning - Jan Bauer
20:00 - Break out session with the speakers

We are looking forward to seeing you there!

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