Summer Research Fellowship
About the program
We ran our pilot Summer Research Fellowship for aspiring technical AI safety and AI alignment researchers from India. Launched in June 2024, it was a two-month, paid program where selected candidates worked with Mentors from leading AI safety labs and institutions on a research project.
The primary objectives of this initiative were to:
- Counterfactually increase the number of individuals working in AI safety/alignment by supporting top tech talent from the Global South.
- Support high-impact Research Leads (Mentors) to further their research agendas in AI safety and alignment.
Applications were open to both advanced university students and working professionals. Fellows receive a competitive stipend, housing, and co-working office space in Bengaluru, as well as a funded, 10-day visit to London.
Our mentors
Sam Brown
Project: Developing a new upliftment benchmark for LLM agents
Sam is an independent AI alignment researcher interested in evals, mechanistic interpretability and agent foundations - currently focussing on LLM agents. Previously software engineer / data scientist / consultant in energy / climate startups. PhD in Physics, involving machine-learning of quantum mechanics using high-performance compute. LinkedIn.
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Kellin Pelrine
Project: Creating a sandbox of AI agents to test out possible disinformation attacks on them
Cofounder and CTO at startup Stitch. Kellin is also a PhD candidate at McGill University and the Mila AI Institute (supervised by Reihaneh Rabbany), a member of the Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship, and a research advisor at FAR AI. At Stitch, he is building the AI extension of your imagination with a visual interface for LLMs. On the research side, his recent focus has been AI safety, misinformation mitigation, and AI agents. LinkedIn.
Impact
Post-program, our Fellows have continued to work with their mentors to develop research outputs for the projects they pursued during the Fellowship. Both projects have achieved significant milestones up till now:
- Workshop papers for both have been accepted to three NeurIPS 2024 workshops, including:
- The sandbox paper has also been accepted to the Safe Generative AI workshop at NeurIPS 2024. You can access the preprint here.
From the album
Testimonials
Sam
The Fellowship was a great avenue to find new talent to advance my work on evaluations of autonomous LLM agents. The Impact Academy team created a streamlined process, from initial selection and onboarding, to providing additional check-ins and accountability, to facilitating the final week in the UK. I've been pleased with the two bright early-career researchers, and we’re continuing to collaborate even after the program, recently being accepted to three NeurIPS workshops, and submitting to the AAMAS ’25 conference.
Sam F. Brown is an independent researcher focused on evals, mechanistic interpretability, and agent foundations. He has a PhD in Physics involving machine learning of quantum mechanics using high-performance compute. He joined as a Mentor for the Summer Research Fellowship 2o24.
Sai
The fellowship accelerated my transition into AI safety. I thoroughly benefited from the mentorship I received, and the program experience was optimised for us to focus on research. The visit to the London Initiative for Safe AI was a valuable experience. It was surprising how much progress we could make in a couple of months!
Sai Sasank Y is pursuing an MS in Computer Science from the Chennai Mathematical Institute and is an ex-Software Engineer at Microsoft. He participated in the Summer Research Fellowship 2024 and has continued working on the research project with his mentor.
Kellin
The Summer Pilot Fellowship was a great way to recruit enthusiastic and productive early-career researchers to advance work towards solving societal-scale manipulation. The two mentees I worked with have become integral members of the project team and we're continuing collaboration after the program. The Impact Academy team also helped streamline the recruiting and some of the project management. I would be excited to participate in future program iterations, and recommend it to other mentors!
Kellin Pelrine is the co-founder and CTO of the startup Stitch, and a PhD candidate at McGill University and the Mila-Quebec AI Institute. He is also a research advisor at FAR.AI. He joined as a Mentor for the Summer Research Fellowship 2024.