The First South African Workshop on AI Safety and Governance

The First South African Workshop on AI Safety and Governance is a multi-disciplinary workshop organised by Effective Altruism UCT and will be hosted at IndabaX 2023.

Program

Talk Title: A Guided Walk Through the African AI Safety Landscape
Speaker: Jonas Kgomo (Equiano Research Lab)

Talk Title: Perspectives on AI Governance in Africa
Speaker: Zainab Chirwa (Effective Altruism UCT Chair and LLB Student at UCT)

Talk Title: An Introduction to Technical AI Safety Research
Speaker: Benjamin Sturgeon (Independent AI Safety Researcher)

Speakers

Jonas Kgomo

Jonas is the founder of Equiano Research Lab (ERL), a new grassroots African AI safety lab. ERL’s mission is to facilitate training young African talent to actively participate in AI alignment and governance research. Jonas is also an active independent researcher working on topics in AI safety, as well as natural language processing for African languages. Jonas is also a mentorship program manager for Cohere For AI, a community that focuses on fostering collaboration and growth in the field of AI. Finally, Jonas founded the Progress Studies Journal, an open-access journal for research in progress studies in domains such as morality, science, technology and economics.

Zainab Chirwa

Zainab is a final year LLB student at the University of Cape Town and a graduate of Rhodes University having majored in Geography and legal theory. She is the current chairperson of the Effective Altruism student society at the University of Cape Town. Zainab is interested in issues of governance the development of effective policy for positive impact. She is currently involved in researching current proposals and drafting of global AI governance frameworks.

Benjamin Sturgeon

Ben, based in Cape Town, used to work as a machine learning engineer. He’s now focused on studying AI safety, using a research grant from the Long Term Future Fund. His research currently focuses on trying to measure levels of agency in AI agents in RL settings. He’s also interested in large language models and how they might be used to influence the behaviour of RL agents.

Organiser

Claude Formanek

Resources

Check out our resources for further reading and ways to connect further.

Financial Support

The Center for Effective Altruism kindly supported this event.