Q&A

Random

How do you pronounce your last name? Like the English word “royal”.

I’d love to grab (virtual) coffee and talk to you, how can I schedule a meeting with you? Best to reach out via email! I plan to have a weekly slot for random meetings that people can just book themselves in via a scheduling link but that hasn’t made it high enough on my todo list yet.

I sent you an email but haven’t received a reply yet. Yeah, this is one of my big weaknesses. I’m not great at email management. In case your inquiry is time sensitive or otherwise critical or requires me to take action on something I previously said yes to, please make sure to put that in all caps in the subject line. If neither of this applies, ping me a second time (a very informal “bumping this up your inbox again” is fine!). If you don’t hear back from me after that, please take this is an “I don’t have capacity right now, to the extent that I can’t even find 2 minutes to reply back.” Sorry to everyone this happened to, I’m working on it – but yeah, definitely not my strong suit…

Research

Can you give me advice on my research? Maybe. I’m very selective these days with any commitments I make and I often have a gazillion open projects at the same time. I’m trying to get better at only saying “yes” to things that I am super excited about and only if I have sufficient capacity for. I’ve overcommitted in the past and that was neither good for me nor my collaborators, so if I say no or don’t reply (see question above on email management…), this shouldn’t be interpreted as me not thinking that your idea is not important or good enough. I’m simply swamped these days.

I want to work on technical AI governance, where should I start? I get this question a lot so I wrote a whole paper (with a lot of fantastic people!) on open problems in the field. Many of these are still not solved (even though the paper is almost 2 years old!) so this is a great place to start.