Mrinank Sharma

Supporting an AI PhD student's research on the effects of removing non-pharmaceutical interventions for COVID-19.

Mrinank is a first-year PhD student at the Autonomous Intelligent Machines and Systems CDT (AIMS) program at Oxford University and a DPhil affiliate at the Future of Humanity Institute. Mrinank was invited to work with the Imperial College London COVID Response team on machine learning (ML) research estimating the effects of removing and then reimplementing COVID-19 restrictions (e.g., opening schools and businesses, and then closing them again). This grant supports his living expenses while he takes a break from his studies to work on this.

I think this research itself is unlikely to have strong effects on the long-term future, but I think it's a good opportunity to support the career of an up-and-coming ML and AI safety researcher. Mrinank has expressed a strong interest in AI safety (e.g. by running the AI safety group at Oxford), and seems committed to using his ML career to do good from a longtermist perspective. My impression from talking to others is that COVID research is an unusually effective way of building credibility in ML right now, and Mrinank has been extremely successful with related work so far -- his paper on the robustness of effectiveness estimations of non-pharmaceutical interventions was accepted as a Spotlight Talk at NeurIPS 2020, his paper on the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions is currently under review at a top-tier journal (and has an Altmetric score of 587), and he was invited to present his work at the Africa CDC.

In general, I think the fund should be hesitant to recommend grants that could likely get funding from sources focused on near-term impact. In this case, the opportunity to do this research seemed very short-lived, and I wasn't aware of any such sources that would fund Mrinank on short notice (applications for fastgrants.org are paused).