Ida Caspary

Welcome !

I am Ida Caspary, a PhD student at Imperial College London. I am part of the Data Learning group at the Imperial Data Science Institute and of the Ada Lovelace Academy. My supervisor is the fantastic Dr Rossella Arcucci. My podcast: Inside Imperial.

& I am Researcher at the Technical AI Saftety Impact Research Group Programme, Arcadia Impact (2025).

My main research is on technical AI Safety. I am developing methods to make foundation models more robust, reliable, and interpretable. I mostly used tools including mechanistic interpretability, failure-mode analysis, and evaluation to understand and mitigate risks in model behaviour. The aim is transparency and controllability in how neural networks make decisions. Mechanistic interpretability is also the focus of the AI safety research group I set up at Imperial College London.

I am also investigating how training decisions after pre-training affect what models reveal about their reasoning and goals. The focus is on keeping monitors reliable across datasets, prompts, and new versions.

My other research interests include robotics and vision-language-action models, innovations of applied machine learning, and cryptography, e.g. homomorphic encryption.

I moved to Scotland after high school for my bachelor's in Computer Science. I spent one semester on exchange in Ottawa, Canada. For my dissertation project, I researched optimised legacy system upgrades. I upgraded the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) software system of the wildlife radiation database maintained by the Environmental Radioactivity Laboratory (ERL).

I am currently very fascinated by faithfulness in chain-of-thought research. As a MATS Scholar I developed, mentored by Neel Nanda and in collaboration with Anton Poleatev, a little investigative kit called CoTFaithChecker - work that is still ongoing.

I'm a former

• CERNler – topic: Explorative Data Layout Analysis of Next-Generation High Energy Physics Datasets, on site at CERN, Switzerland
• IBMer – intern, then working student; worked 17 months at IBM Cognitive Analytics Consulting
• Bosch Working Student #LikeABosch – in the IT Department! most exciting time to be there, while it was built out to a fully automated semiconductor manufacturing plant
• Journalist – with ZDF, BASF, Sächsische Zeitung, Tagesspiegel, and lots of uni/school newspapers. I love researching intriguing subjects.