Alexander Turner
Independent Researcher at Self-employed
Berkeley, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolAlexander Turner is an independent researcher and PhD-trained AI scientist based in Berkeley with a decade of experience bridging theoretical foundations and hands-on agent development. His work spans academic and applied settings—from postdoctoral research and collaborations at CHAI and Oxford’s FHI to mentoring junior alignment researchers at SERI—focusing on agent behavior, retargetability, and incentives like deactivation avoidance. He has built planning-agent libraries, novel environments (including a ground-up chess environment), and has practical experience steering language models via activation vectors. Comfortable both teaching and mentoring, he has a track record of translating formal theorems into testable experiments and tooling. Known for tinkering roots in game-driven CS, he combines curiosity about video-game-inspired problems with rigorous safety-oriented research.
10 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor's degree, Bachelor's degree at Grinnell CollegeDoctor of Philosophy - PhD, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD at Oregon State UniversityDiploma, Diploma at Bettendorf High School
Japanese, French, English
Github Skills (94)
openai-gym10
maze10
tray-icon9
q-learning9
gymnasium9
skin9
taskbar8
deep-learning8
cursors8
gitter8
discord8
aero8
reinforcement-learning8
markdown7
javascript7
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
alexander-turner/PyPlan
Apr 2017 - Feb 2018
Contributions:249 commits, 128 pushes, 7 branches in 9 months
UlisseMini/procgen-tools
Jan 2023 - Mar 2023
Tools for running experiments on RL agents in procgen environments
Contributions:356 commits, 184 pushes, 10 branches in 1 month
deep-learningmazemlopenai-gymprocgen
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