Alan Cooney
Research Scientist at AI Security Institute
Stony Stratford, England, United Kingdom
Summary
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Top SchoolAlan Cooney is a research scientist and former founder with seven years of experience at the intersection of AI safety, autonomous systems, and production engineering. Currently at the AI Security Institute, he researches empirical control and alignment, focusing on goal monitoring and shutdown thresholds after leading teams on control and loss-of-control risks. He previously founded and scaled Skyhook to $5M+ annual sales and led its migration to a serverless, event-driven architecture while producing widely used open-source tools (one with 230k downloads). Alan combines rigorous research experience from SERI MATS and practical engineering chops—CI/CD, observability, GraphQL/DynamoDB pipelines—with a background in econometric modelling from institutional investment consulting. He is comfortable translating conceptual safety work into realistic empirical evaluations and mitigations, and has a knack for building developer-facing tools that bridge research and production. Based in the UK, he brings both entrepreneurial drive and formal training in PPE economics to hard problems in AI control.
8 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Philosophy Politics & Economics Economics, Philosophy Politics & Economics Economics at Durham University
Stackoverflow
47reputation
0reached
1answer
0questions
Github Skills (147)
language-model10
documentclient10
aws-s310
visualizations10
autoencoder10
aws-amplify10
facebook-pixel10
gpt10
aws10
javascript9
cloud-services9
aws-apigateway9
google-analytics9
multi-agent-reinforcement-learning9
amazon-cognito9
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
ai-safety-foundation/sparse_autoencoder
Oct 2023 - Mar 2024
Sparse Autoencoder for Mechanistic Interpretability
Contributions:33 releases, 30 reviews, 248 PRs in 4 months
autoencoder
skyhookadventure/eventfan
Aug 2021 - Jun 2022
Setup analytics destinations (e.g. Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel) in a really simple way on React/node
Contributions:1 release, 244 commits, 30 PRs in 10 months
facebook-pixelgoogle-analyticsreact
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