Profile

I love spending time with friends and family: my niece and nephew are very important to me! But I also like having time to myself to relax and recharge, so I like quiet evenings in more than going out every night. I live in Bath right now, but I’d quite like to move somewhere quiet like the village I grew up in one day.

In my free time, I like to play video games and board games, read, and play the bass guitar. I also like to cook and try out new recipes. Although I’m not very good at art, I enjoy doing it as a hobby. I also like learning new things and meeting new people, so I like to attend courses for things that interest me, like art and languages. I’m a big fan of anime and manga, and I enjoy watching and reading them in my spare time.

One day, I’d like to visit Japan and experience its culture and food. I like traveling to all sorts of new places and trying new things though. I’m not very sporty, but I enjoy doing martial arts and bouldering, and I’d like to try some other sports like ice skating and volleyball.

When I was younger, I wanted to be a secret agent, then the prime minister, and later a lawyer. But as I got older, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. I even spent a while thinking I’d like to be a chef! Eventually I decided that I wanted to be a scientist though, and luckily, I still do!

My favourite animal is foxes, but they don’t make very good pets unfortunately. If I did have a pet, I’d be happy with a dog, a cat, or even rats! I wouldn’t want a pet bird though, because I used to have to sleep with noisy budgies in my bedroom, and it was not very pleasant!

I work with artificial intelligence, or AI for short. AI is like a computer brain that can make decisions on its own. I’m trying to figure out how to teach AI to care about the same things we do, like being kind to each other and being fair. To do this, I use ideas from psychology, which is the study of how people think and feel. Psychology helps us understand what’s important to people, which we call values. I take these ideas about values and use mathematics to build computer programs that can understand and talk about them in a way that’s similar to how humans experience and express them.

For example, imagine an AI that suggests videos for you to watch. You might not want the AI to suggest scary videos if you don’t like them, because they might upset you. But other people might enjoy scary videos, so they would want the AI to suggest those. A responsible AI would understand that different people have different preferences and try to suggest videos that are right for each person.

My goal is to make AI that can behave responsibly and make decisions that are good for everyone. This is important because AI is becoming a bigger part of our lives, and we want to make sure it’s helping us in positive ways, rather than causing problems. For instance, a responsible AI wouldn’t try to get you to watch videos when you’re trying to sleep or do your homework. It would understand that you have other things you need to do, and not try to distract you from those. By teaching AI to care about human values and behave responsibly, we can create technology that helps us live better lives and makes the world a better place.

I usually start working about 10 am, because it takes a long time for my brain to switch on in the morning! I discuss my work with my supervisor over a coffee, then spend time looking at research ideas that other scientists have published, or experiment with computer code to try and put those ideas into action. Sometimes this means having long conversations with an AI to see if it understands what I’m telling it, which I do by asking it lots of questions and studying what it says back. When I’m done, I have to write the results up so that I can share them with other scientists and get their thoughts.  Sometimes I don’t stop thinking until quite late in the evening, but I still make time to enjoy my hobbies and look after myself.