Activity Update - October 2017
This post is part of our monthly activity update series. Each activity update briefly describes what we've been up to in the last month and, hopefully, helps to shed light on how our priorities shift over time. Note that some of our time each month will be spent investigating future project opportunities that may not be covered in these posts until our plans are more solid.
Accomplishments
BERI has been focusing on recruitment this month. We have compiled a list of potential candidates for two new roles: Operations and Finance Manager and Project Manager. We also wrote two blog posts explaining why we are recruiting and how we hope incoming staff will fit into BERI's overall mission (first blog post, second blog post).
We hired Kyle Scott as a part-time Project Manager.
We completed one trial with a machine learning engineer interested in supporting CHAI's research; while the engineer will not be joining our team, this has allowed us to move onto the next few candidates in our pipeline.
Our Grants Program made a second general support grant to the Future of Life Institute, for $50,000.
Setbacks
We had expected to post a scholarship application form on our website this month; however, this project has been slightly delayed. We hope to post the application form in the next month.
Works in Progress
BERI is currently researching our options for supporting several x-risk-motivated professors' work.
BERI is also exploring the feasibility of offering computational resources to x-risk motivated researchers and graduate students.
We are planning a "BERI meet-and-greet" event to introduce ourselves to the Bay Area effective altruism community. This event will be held at 7pm on Monday, November 13th, at the CFAR office (2030 Addison St, 7th Floor, Berkeley).
We are also planning an online meet-and-greet for folks who are not in the Bay Area; it will be held on Thursday, November 16th, at 3pm Pacific Time. More details on how to join can be found in our Facebook event.