Nick Hayes

AI Safety | Climate

About

I'm currently working on AI Safety and AI for Climate. In the former, I study how models (mis)behave in real-world scenarios, drawing on ideas from adversarial robustness, alignment, and interpretability while advocating for technical AI governance. In the latter, I aim to apply the most powerful technical tools of our time to one of the most pressing global issues of our time, with interests in the East African Climate Paradox, Energy Optimization, and Natural Disaster Mitigation.

My interests are very broad, but generally united by an aim to do social and environmental good. In the past, this has included dolphin vocalization research, political discourse analysis, freelance translating, and data science for a global security nonprofit. Read more about my work at my blog.

I earned master's degrees in Mathematics and Linguistics from Oxford, where I studied as a Rhodes Scholar. Prior to Oxford, I earned degrees in Mathematics and German from the University of Alabama, with some side quests into physics, psychology, and computer science. I also spent an academic year in Tanzania as a Boren Scholar, where I earned a fluency certificate in Swahili. For my CV: professional | fun.


Please have a low bar for reaching out if anything piques your interest.
I would love to hear from you.


Academic Work

Mathematics

Linguistics

Experience

Fun
Center for Advanced Defense Studies

Data Scientist

Hired as an intern and then contract data scientist. Became a swiss-army knife for ML, NLP, and web-scraping tasks. Worked broadly on anti-trafficking and lead generation. Highlights include building a geolocation pipeline for Vietnamese addresses (anti-pangolin trafficking), finetuning an object recognition model with synthetic aperture radar data, automating an analysis of political speeches in Mandarin, and fighting with Selenium.

Tech Stack: Python, AWS -> GCP

NOAA Northeast Fisheries Science Center

Machine Learning Research Intern

Created a classification model for 9 cetacean species in the Western North Atlantic using passive acoustic recordings. Spent my mornings listening to dolphin clicks and analyzing spectograms, spent my afternoons playing with random forest models. Learned how to identify Risso's dolphin by ear.

Tech Stack: PAMGuard, R

Respond Crises Translations

Swahili Translator

Translated an 85 page legal document from English to Swahili for Lawyers without Borders. Ongoing pro-bono translations as needed.

US Department of State

Data Science Intern

Built an annotated dataset of research papers for downstream summarization tasks. Automated my work using NER and summarization techniques, spent the saved time teaching myself web development.

Tech Stack: Python

Protagonist

Swahili Consultant

Contracted to translate search queries and evaluate translation accuracy of Tanzanian media. My favorite mistranslation: "uwanja wa ndege" (airport) translated as "field of birds."

DORCAS

Project Management Intern

Translated grant propopsals (Swahili/English, occasionally Dutch) and conducted field interviews with program beneficiaries in Swahili. Drank copious amounts of tea and never learned how not to burn my tongue.

The University of Alabama

Teaching Assistant, Physics

Led lab sessions for introductory physics (Mechanics, Electricity & Magnetism). Still have no idea how a bicycle stays upright (but neither does anyone else).

Land's End to John o'Groats

Cyclist

Cycled over 1000 miles in 13 days in a self-supported cycletour from the southwestern tip to the northeastern tip of the UK. Camped in the yards of exceptionally kind strangers, averaged two packs of Haribo a day, and learned about cyclist's palsy when I lost feeling in my left hand. Never quite escaped the rain, never quite learned to love it either.

The Invariants

Poet

Won a gift card for writing a poem about math.

Georgia Jewel pt. 2

Ultramarathoner

Didn't break my ankle this time. Nice. Finished the race with my brother.

TEDxUniversityofAlabama

Executive Director

Brought the official TEDx stamp to the University of Alabama. You can find the talks on YouTube.

Georgia Jewel pt. 1

Ultramarathoner

Raised over $5000 for Pediatric Brain Tumor Foundation while trying to run my first ultramarathon. Also broke my ankle. Oops.

Refugee Empowerment Program

English Teacher

Taught three levels of English to East African refugees in Memphis, TN for two months until COVID hit. Served as a Swahili-English cultural liaison and helped students prepare for citizenship tests.