I’m a PhD candidate in the engineering department at the University of Cambridge. I’m interested in solving problems that maximise expected human prosperity, and I’m generally method-agnostic. In the past, that meant working on technical problems related to climate change mitigation. More recently, it’s meant working on problems in Reinforcement Learning (RL) and AI. My PhD is on zero-shot generalisation in RL, where the goal is to build agents that can quickly generalise to novel tasks and environments. Check out my projects page or google scholar for more info.

I don’t believe many things strongly, but I’m willing to defend the following:

• Progress is possible and desirable
• Decentralised > centralised
• We need better maths teachers
• Celcius > Fahrenheit
• Most problems aren’t actually problems. Finding real problems is extremely difficult.

I’m always keen to hear from new people. You can book a chat with me here, send me an email (srj38 (at) cam(dot)ac(dot)uk), or hit me up on twitter/X @enjeeneer.

Scott