Now

Hi, I’m Dan MacKinlay. This is my now page, in a constellation of now pages.

• Pivoting to AI safety as my critical-risk project.

  • I’m helping to spin up the Melbourne AI Safety hub in a small capacity, alongside luminaries such as Liam Carroll, Dan Murfet, Alexander K Saeri, and many other colleagues whose homepages I haven’t linked yet.
  • I’m negotiating to found ████████████, an academic journal of █████████ with ████████████.

• I’m employed at CSIRO

  • I build hybrid machine learning methods for the physical sciences.
  • I’m involved in negotiating the ongoing job cuts in CSIRO (e.g.) as a delegate of the CSIRO Staff Association. This is part of broader massive funding cuts — both in real dollars and as a proportion of GDP.

• My contract is winding up soon, so I’m actively looking for.

For all of the above, I maintain a separate, aspirational reading and writing worklist.

I’ve moved to Melbourne as part of my cohousing project ( Ouroboros is the housing group; we’d love skill shares) and my new, explicit extrovert’s commitment to group projects in general. I’m trying to build out a gig space in our shopfront, but it’s hard when the collective is small and time is short.

Musically, I’m still DJing, but not professionally any longer. I’ll upload some new mixes if I can work out which old mixes to delete. I don’t have much time for music production at the moment, but our Lotekno EPs are gradually coming out.

My current research interests are causal agency and physically informed diffusion in machine learning.

As an ML researcher, I can’t stop philosophising about various themes in epistemology and ethics. For more details about my research, check my currently reading and writing list.

Yes, I’m up for collaborations.