Evžen Wybitul

Evžen of Christmas Past is a high-school debater, clarinettist, amateur poet, and a regular at the regional rounds of many a school olympiad, from mathematics to human rights. You will, however, (essentially) never find him in the national finals. Unsure what to focus on in life, he decides to study something that will allow him to defer the decision to a later time — computer science. But he grows restless as the application day nears, and in the end, he switches to bioinformatics, because computer science, broad as it was, was after all still just one, well defined, concrete thing.

Evžen of Christmas More Recently Past did bioinformatics at Charles University in Prague, wrote software at IOCB, worked as a data scientist at a pharma company, and taught functional programming to high-school students — all more or less at the same time. He applied to ETH Zürich for data science, another wonderfully ill-defined field, combining mathematics, computer science, and artificial intelligence. At ETH, supported by the Bakala Foundation, he turned to AI safety, and twice went through the highly selective MATS research programme in Berkeley, working on technical safety research under mentors from Google DeepMind. He also did the Talos AI Governance Fellowship, because he wanted to understand not just how to make AI safe, but how to make sure its impact on society is positive.

Evžen of Christmas Present is doing a PhD (well, a DPhil) at the University of Oxford, where he works on technical AI safety and technical AI governance. His aim is to make it easier for developers to build models that are safe without crippling them, and to give policymakers sharper tools to govern AI systems. Looking back, he is beginning to suspect that every restless turn, every last-minute switch, was quietly leading him exactly where he needed to be.

Evžen of Christmas Yet to Come is still trying to make sure that people are empowered by AI and that human values persist in the universe. He programs, runs experiments, talks to policymakers, and explains AI to the public. And he's still writing poetry, doing photography, and sometimes even playing the clarinet.

And if I know him at all, he does all of this eagerly, distractedly — and more or less all at the same time.