I am an AI Scientist + Social Scientist looking to build moral alignment into AI. At the moment I am studying this in agent-based simulations (e.g. Multi-Agent RL with independent learners) and foundation models (e.g. Gemma), with inspiration from moral philosophy, psychology and economics.

Currently I’m a PhD candidate at the Machine Intelligence Lab, Department of Computer Science, University College London (UCL). I am conducting my PhD research on the problem of Morality - in humans and machines - funded by the Leverhulme Doctoral Training Programme for the Ecological Study of the Brain. Before my PhD I studied Psychology & Linguistics (@ UCL), conducted research on political psychology using Twitter data (@ Cambridge), and worked as an AI/Data Scientist and Behavioural Scientist at two start-ups and a large investment bank.

My research combines Artificial Intelligence with Moral Philosophy and Social Psychology. I use simulation methods, Reinforcement Learning, Game Theory and Language Models to 1) study the emergence of ethical and cooperative behaviour in multi-agent social dilemma environments, and 2) provide insights for developing morality for real-world, interactive learning & decision-making AI systems in the future. My latest project has focused on analysing multi-agent interactions between learning artificial agents that differ in their moral objective functions, trying to generate insights for behaviours and social outcomes that emerge in morally heterogeneous societies.

News

• [April 2024] I’m at the InterpViz Mechanistic Interpretability hackathon at LISA (The London Initiative for Safe AI)!
• [March 2024] New preprint out: Dynamics of Moral Behavior in Heterogeneous Populations of Learning Agents see arXiv
• [December 2023] New preprint out: Learning Machine Morality through Experience and Interaction (see arXiv)
• [November 2023] Gave a (long) student talk at LSE about how AI and Social Science can mutually benefit one another, and interesting questions emerging around aligning LLMs with human values.
• [November 2023] I’m at the Anthropic Hackathon in London!
• [November 2023] Presenting our IJCAI paper at two UCL Conferences - the Computer Science Student Conference (long talk) and the Neuro AI Conference (lightning talk).
• [August 2023] Presented our paper “Modeling Moral Choices in Social Dilemmas with Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning” at the 32nd International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2023) (main track) in Macao. Links & materials here.
• [July 2023] I’m at the Cooperative AI Foundation Summer School in London!
• [May 2023] Spent a week volunteering at the 22nd International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2023) in London.

Education

• PhD Computer Science (Leverhulme Doctoral Training Programme for the Ecological Study of the Brain), University College London, 2022-2025 (ONGOING)
• MPhil Biological Science (Psychology), University of Cambridge, 2019-2020. Full-time research, based at the Political Psychology Lab. In my research I studied political and linguistic behaviour on Twitter using Social Network Analysis and Natural Language Processing.
• BSc Psychology & Language Sciences, University College London, 2016-2019.

Previous experience

• Quantitative UX Researcher, JPMorgan (user experience analytics within the Corporate & Investment Bank, Markets business), 2021-2022.
• Data & Behavioural Scientist, Rooster Insurance (car insurance startup which based its pricing model on behavioural data rather than demographcis), 2021.
• Behavioural & AI Scientist, ProdX.ai (productivity startup which was building a product to make digital workers more productive thourgh automated, data-driven & psychology-inspired coaching), 2020.

Other

I’m in the process of changing my last name from Karmannaya to Tennant. If you see different names listed on different publications, don’t get confused :)