Thomas Woodside Email & Phone Number

Washington, DC, US

Consulting on AI policy (volunteer)

Worked on SB 1047, a landmark AI regulation bill in California which advanced the conversation around AI safety. The Center for AI Safety Action Fund was one of the bill's co-sponsors. The bill passed both houses of the California legislature before being vetoed by the Governor.Primarily worked on amendments to the legislation in collaboration with Senator.

Washington, District Of Columbia, United States

Worked on the Foundational Research Grants team. I helped with grantmaking, writing technical explainers for policymakers, and projects involving agentic AI systems. My fellowship placement was funded by the Horizon Institute for Public Service.

- Worked on a research project involving Trojan attacks in large language models. Co write the ML safety newsletter.- Answered technical questions for philosophers in the CAIS Philosophy Fellowship. Assisted with policy engagement. - Co authored An Overview of Catastrophic AI Risks paper and contributed to the forthcoming AI Ethics, Safety, and Society.

Palo Alto, California, United States

• Collaborated with the CEO, Dan Hendrycks, and supported growth of the organization from 1 employee to 10
• Co-wrote the organization’s 150 page research agenda and contributed to machine learning research projects in machine ethics and legal natural language processing (see publications below).
• Authored blog posts, grant proposals, and other written content for the organization.
• Founded and directly managed the online Machine Learning Safety Scholars summer program, involving ~65 college students from 20 countries. Hired and managed 8 teaching assistants.
• Provided feedback on language for the $20 million NSF Safe Learning-Enabled Systems program.

Berkeley, California, United States

• Ran more than 2000 experiments using the lab’s computer cluster in support of one of Professor Stuart Russell’s PhD students.
• Worked on a research project that aimed to help reinforcement learning agents avoid unsafe states by following human instructions.

Redwood City, California, United States

• Interned at a startup working on mobile authentication based on gait (walking patterns).
• Cleaned and integrated an external academic dataset into the startup’s internal testing data.
• Rewrote a tool used to graphically compare the performance of trained machine learning models.

Mountain View, California, United States

Worked on improving a convolutional neural network to infer strength of the green wavelength in satellite imagery from other sensor readings. This tool made it possible to produce color satellite images.

San Francisco, California, United States

Analyzed web event data to recommend optimizations to Kiva's lend page. Developed a system to automatically classify common types of support tickets.

Remote

Contracted to mentor current students on content for the Data Analyst Nanodegree and Self-Driving Car Nanodegree.Answered over 2000 student questions.

San Francisco, California, United States

Wrote a program to distribute some of Kiva’s data publically to interested researchers; gained extensive knowledge of Kiva’s database and data warehouse.Used gradient boosting and a long short-term memory network to make predictions about future loans on Kiva.

Menlo Park, California, United States

Developed software for Looma, an affordable and low power consuming audio-visual technology device access to educational content to Nepalese schools.Worked on a team tasked with developing a lightweight, offline slideshow tool that would allow teachers to make customizable presentations using preloaded images.