EPIC Lunch Talk: Effective Altruism, impactful careers and the search for robustly beneficial algorithms

Dear EDIC PhDs and members of IC,

It is our great pleasure to announce the first EPIC Lunch Talk of this year, which will be delivered by fresh EPFL PhD graduate Louis Faucon.

The EPIC Lunch Talk sessions aim to enable conversations with distinguished members and researchers of IC community, create a forum to share their experiences with aspiring scientists, and engage in discussions about research, their perspectives about larger things in life, and teach us about the lessons learned on their career paths. 

Due to the extraordinary situation the meeting will take place via Zoom (contact the organizer for the link), where we hope you will use it as an opportunity to listen to the extraordinary speaker, and engage in the discussion afterwards.

Abstract: Effective Altruism is an intellectual project built around the question: How can we do the most good? When reflecting on this question it is clear that we are limited in the good we can do by our available resources. Therefore, Effective altruists seek to do good efficiently by relying on robust methods and reliable data. These principles can be used to help plan for an impactful career. In the second part of the talk, we will focus on the challenge of building robustly beneficial algorithms. Louis will discuss key aspects in which algorithms fail to be beneficial and will argue that, today, it seems urgent that more engineers reflect on the consequences of automated information processing systems and seek to build robustly beneficial algorithms.

Organization: The talk will be organized as a 45min presentation followed by a Q&A. The goal is to introduce to the core ideas of Effective Altruism, impactful career planning and robustly beneficial algorithms. Louis will also share resources and contacts for those who wish to learn more, receive personal career advice, or actively participate in the movement.

Bio: Louis recently finished his PhD in the doctoral program in computer & communication sciences (EDIC) at EPFL where he worked on applications of Machine Learning to adaptive educational technology. He was the vice-president of the local Effective Altruism student association, with which he has co-organized weekly discussions on the ethics of artificial intelligence.

We encourage you to join and take part in the conversation, and hope to see you next Tuesday!

Best,
Viktor Sanca (on behalf of EPIC - Association of EPFL PhDs in Computer & Communication Sciences)
https://epic.epfl.ch/