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 awesome Dr Rossella Arcucci. Currently, I am doing the OpenAI Safety Fellowship in California. I was previously doing Constellation's Astra Research Fellowship, mentored by Asa Cooper Stickland, on distributed attacks in AI control.

I'll proudly be presenting Josh's and my main Astra result as a spotlighted paper at COLM!

My main research is on technical AI Safety. I am focusing on AI control and evaluations. I loved e.g. contributing to the large No-CoT Time-Horizons study and the first full-scale evaluation of Kimi K2.5 back when it was freshly released. The focus of the AI safety research group I set up at Imperial College London is Mechanistic Interpretability. I'm still fascinated by those tools, and curiously following updates e.g. from Simplex and Goodfire, but mostly now trying to understand how we can efficiently + robustly + scalably detect what models are able to do and would realistically do in deployment. My other research interests include robotics / vision-language-action models, 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, supervised by Dr Patrick Maier. I upgraded the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) software system of the wildlife radiation database maintained by the Environmental Radioactivity Laboratory (ERL).

I am also very fascinated by faithfulness in chain-of-thought research. As a MATS project, I developed, mentored by Neel Nanda and in collaboration with Anton Poletaev, 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, Sächsische Zeitung, SPIESSER, Tagesspiegel, and lots of uni/school newspapers. I love researching intriguing subjects.