Gavin Leech
πͺ Work πͺ
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Researching AI, forecasting, metascience, epidemiology, intellectual history, and cause prioritisation. Cofounded with Misha Yagudin.Public work here.
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Comms and concepts at a new research group at Charles University Prague. We work on formal theories for neglected problems with AI.
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Co-founder of the Active Longtermist Emergency Response Team, a pop-up think tank filling gaps in state capacity. Ran initial strategy, fundraising, executive search, board selection, external collaborations, recruiting.
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I chaired the Emergent Ventures / Schmidt Futures panel on AI Talent and wrote most of the resulting report.
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Modelled COVID with Oxford / Imperial / Harvard colleagues. Probabilistic programming, technical writing, data cleaning, literature reviews.
7 papers in 14 months. I led a major study of mask effectiveness.
Buzzwords: PyMC3, MRP (hierarchical Bayes), AWS, Azure, Seaborn
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Solo instructor in CS tutorials, training other TAs. Bayesian ML & Algos 2.
Buzzwords: Gaussian processes, Markov Random Fields, Bayesian opt., variational inference, dynamic programming, graph theory, complexity
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Buzzwords: Python, Spark, Keras, XGBoost, Tableau, Avro, Pytest, GDPR
Built dozens of ML models (GLMs, GBMs, neural nets) for actuarial pricing, medical risk, & image recognition. Web scraping at scale; migration from SAS to Hadoop, & Hadoop to Azure. Came in as a graduate data scientist, left as tech lead for a team of 4.
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Jumped into web dev; my code deployed worldwide within 2 weeks.
Products: a medicine pump device manager & a pharmacy record system.
Buzzwords: C#, WPF, node.JS, MEAN, Ractive, Mongo, Vagrant, VMware
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Made official statistics, Education Analytics. Testing for a data visualisation tool for teachers: SAS/SQL. Prep for the Social Care Survey 2015.
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Publications
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Education
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AI PhD
Probabilistic programming, AI safety. Long detour on COVID models.First year was a de-facto research Masterβs (uncertainty modelling, NLP, GOFAI, legal aspects).
Second year: COVID modelling. EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training studentship (4 years fully funded).Thesis: Tensorised Probabilistic Programming
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BSc Maths & Stats
89% GPA β 96th percentile.
Probability up to diffusion processes, regression to GLMMs, numerics to BFGS, linear algebra to multi-linear, RCTs. Part-time during FT work. Reviewed here.
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MSc Software Development
82% GPA β 85th percentile.
Fairly vocational. Java, SQL, HTML/CSS/PHP, assembly, design patterns, data structures & algos.Thesis: Hidden Markov Models for Linguistic Accommodation.
Full-ride Scottish Funding Council scholarship.
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MA Economics & Philosophy
85% GPA β 90th percentile.
Micro and macro, Ethics, global justice, Continental philosophy, development policy, formal logic, social statistics, health policy, development policy.
Dissertation: On the Abolition of Foreign Aid. Alumni Fund scholarship.
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Awards
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Residencies: Prague Fall Season, Mexico EA Fellowship
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Emergent Ventures grant for a few wild ideas.
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1st prize, Advanced Modelling of Cybercrime hackathon.
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EA Forum Prize, modelling AI safety
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1st place in the Value Forecasting Tournament.
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UKRI studentship for PhD (~$150k).
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Tech
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New Pycolab environments and implementations of DQN and MaxEnt IRL in Tensorflow. Reused in Deepmind papers.
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Brought modern language modelling (Flair) into Prolog for some reason.
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Journal-grade modern Bayesian workflow in PyMC3. Probabilistic programming for epidemic modelling and effect estimation. End to end with data getters.
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Python wrapper for the Hidden Markov ToolKit.
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Solving little computational maths problems. Gimmick is I donβt import anything.
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Just a Jekyll site, but a particularly satisfying one.
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Volunteering
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Head of camp / instructor for the European Summer Programme on Rationality: a grand maths and experiential education camp.
I ran ESPR 2022 and often run sessions on personal agency, research skills, speculative astronomy, and cultural literacy.
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Unofficial career coach for beginners in technical AI research and PhDs and stuff.
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Panellist on the EA Criticism and Red-teaming Contest. Ended up as top reviewer (170 reviews).
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Vetting & interviewing for a scrappy intro to AI safety research.
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I started a thing to help people with executive dysfunction. Fully funded by a bitcoin rando! Thanks!
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Gender development projects