Global Challenge: Reverse-Engineer The Brain
My wish is to attack problems that lie right at the heart of society. If we could protect the world with proper AI safety safeguards and allow effortless travel with enhanced public transportation, my mission would be complete."
Bio:
Michael Batavia is a Computer Science and Technology Management student from the NYU Tandon School of Engineering and a GLASS honors student from The Bronx, NY engaged in work primarily focusing on UN Sustainable Development Goals #9 and #11: Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure and Sustainable Cities and Communities. During his time at GLASS, he has studied abroad in 5 countries (Spain, Sweden, Vietnam, South Korea and Portugal) and worked on cutting-edge mobility research projects at NYU Langone Health and at the Cornell Nanoscale Facility.
He has also worked with start-ups at the NYU Future Labs, working on integrating new and advanced artificial intelligence and large language model technologies into B2B efficiency products, marketing toolkits and in the construction of new buildings and highrises. During his time abroad, his focus has been on the regulation of AI technologies through AI safety programs and techniques such as through interpretability, inner and outer alignment and chain-of-thought prompting. Contributing to discussions in AI Alignment programs run by Lund University and facilitating research paper reviews with students from all over the world (Munich, Toronto, New York City, Rio De Janeiro, Budapest, Dresden, Stockholm) with the help of Effective Altruism Hungary has solidified his passion for this field and future work and research in post-graduate studies.
By pursuing research in this way through entrepreneurship and research and by working with universities doing research at the cutting-edge and companies building on large language models, he believes that one could explore how to improve automation at its highest level, explore new neural linking structures and deliver new and improved impacts on the field of health informatics. In the medical sector, one might be able to predict cancer before it develops throughout the body with convolutional neural networks and create new drug delivery devices with computer vision and nanotechnology that could not be done before using object detection software.
With his passion, determination and curiosity in biomedicine, nanotechnology, deep learning and in public transportation networks, Michael knows that he can improve the state of infrastructure and innovation one agile step at a time.