I am fairly new to the AI alignment/safety community and I am looking to step up my game by getting a Ph.D. in the field. Problem is, I have not found any academic AI alignment research activity here in Spain, where I currently live.

I am aware that this community is largely based on the States and the UK, but it would be far too difficult for me to move there for a wide variety of reasons, and so I am instead trying to exhaust all local possibilities I have available before turning my life upside-down.

I am interested in just about any alignment research, but my speciality is software security, BCI and computational neuroscience. Contact me if you're interested in having a collaborator/sparring partner/mentee or simply someone to talk about AI stuff.

Let's get to making AI alignment an international movement ;)

New Comment
3 comments, sorted by Click to highlight new comments since: Today at 12:06 PM

There is an EU telegram group where they are, among other things, collecting data on where people are in Europe. I'll DM an invite.

Hey Antb, I'm Pablo, Spanish and based in Spain. As far as I know these are the following AI Safety researchers:

  • Jaime Sevilla leads the organization Epoch AI, mostly interested in forecasting AI.
  • Juan Rocamonde and Adrià Garriga work full time on AI alignment in FAR.ai and Redwood Research.
  • There is a professor, called Jose Hernández Orallo, working between Cambridge and Valencia who has been for quite a while in AI Safety. I know him and he is an excellent researcher. Part of the existential AI Safety FLI community, and mostly interested in measuring intelligence.
  • There are also a couple of other professors at the Carlos III university in Madrid who could be friendly to these topics (see eg https://e-archivo.uc3m.es/handle/10016/29354), but it is unclear to what extent they would put this as their main research field.
  • I work part-time as a science communicator in FAR.ai

In summary: if you want to stay in Spain probably you should go to Jose's group. I am happy to introduce you to Jose, with whom I did an internship a year and a half ago. We also have a Spanish-speaking EA community in case you're interested. Hope this is useful.

If you want to join the Spanish-speaking EA community, you can do so through this link!