hi, i'm benjamin

I’m a researcher and engineer focused on building AI that’s aligned with human values. I am currently working on AI control research with Mary Phuong as part of LASR Labs in London.

I am also a Fellow in the Transportation and Land Use program of the Marron Institute at New York University, where I leverage machine learning to study urban governance issues related to transportation, government responsiveness, policing and use of public space.

Read my latest article where I highlight a chronic issue in New York City and how it’s emblematic of the challenges of crafting effective policies when underlying data is tainted. This piece is largely based on this research paper where I used machine learning to study how police respond to illegal parking complaints. It paints dire picture where the majority of cases are ignored and offers concrete solutions to make streets safer.

This built on earlier work I did using computer vision and official data to understand the chaotic nature of New York City streets.

You can e-mail me if you’d like to chat about new projects, urbanism, music or ways to make the world a better place for all humans.

I like learning

I had a great experience attending a programming residency at the Recurse Center, where I worked on projects related to technical AI safety. While I was there I built a lot of things, including:

• An LLM tokenizer in Python that uses C extensions to optimize performance
• An implementation of GPT-2 where I only relied on research papers for reference
• A deepdream algorithm to visualize parameters of a CNN image classifier and developed methods to “blind” the model to specific objects using principles of mechanistic interpretability

I like to tinker

I was tired of checking my phone for subway departures, so I built an LED arrival board for my living room.

I spent a night at NYC’s Museum of Modern Art watching a film that made me think a lot about time.