Blake Elias
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About
I am a researcher at the New England Complex Systems Institute, working under Yaneer Bar-Yam. My current work examines the game-theoretic and collective decision-making aspects of pandemic response.
My interests include machine learning, game theory and neural-symbolic reasoning. I am interested in applying AI for social good, via tools that amplify human collective intelligence and group decision-making, and via the design of better economic policy and social systems.
Previously, I was an AI Resident at Microsoft Research working on neural-symbolic computation and human-AI collaboration. Before this, I completed my SB and MEng degrees at MIT in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, where I worked in the Media Lab and Synthetic Biology Center.
Recent Writing
Multi-Agent Cooperation via Intrinsic MotivationMarch 2, 2021
Intrinsic Reward, Biological Utility, and Saving the PlanetMarch 1, 2021
Open-Endedness, Multi-Agent Learning and Existential RiskOctober 10, 2020
Should the World Stay Home for a Month?March 11, 2020
Publications
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Pandemic Response as Reinforcement Learning Blake Elias, Alexander Siegenfeld, Yaneer Bar-Yam. NeurIPS 2020 Workshop on Machine Learning for Economic Policy. paper | code |
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Human-Machine Collaboration for Fast Land Cover Mapping Caleb Robinson, Anthony Ortiz, Kolya Malkin, Blake Elias, Andi Peng, Dan Morris, Bistra Dilkina, Nebojsa Jojic. Thirty-Fourth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2020. Oral. pdf | arXiv | code | video |
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High Throughput Pin-Tool Based Automated DNA Assembly Master of Engineering Thesis, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT, 2018. pdf | MIT DSpace |
Covid
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Pandemic Response as Reinforcement Learning Blake Elias, Alexander Siegenfeld, Yaneer Bar-Yam. NeurIPS 2020 Workshop on Machine Learning for Economic Policy. paper | code |
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Is Locking Down Worth It? Blake Elias, Alexander Siegenfeld, Yaneer Bar-Yam. |
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Pandemic Lockdown Decision-Making Bruno Felix, Chris Moreno-Stokoe, Sascha Frankel, Lennart Quispel, Ana Martinovici, Blake Elias, Yaneer Bar-Yam |
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Respiratory Health for Better COVID-19 Outcomes Blake Elias, Chen Shen, Yaneer Bar-Yam. March 16, 2020. New England Complex Systems Institute. pdf | web |
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Should the World Stay Home for a Month? March 11, 2020. |
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Could Air Filtration Reduce COVID-19 Severity and Spread? Blake Elias, Yaneer Bar-Yam. March 9, 2020. New England Complex Systems Institute. pdf | web |
Coding Projects
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Neural-Symbolic Program Synthesis poster |
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Toski (Scheme Debugger) Kenneth Friedman, Blake Elias, Jared Pochtar code | report | blog |
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Homer: Spaced Repetition Learning code | report |
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Zero Robotics competition (team founder) Team site | code (2010) | code (2011) | video (simulation) | video (ISS run) |
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FIRST Robotics Competition code (2010-2011) | code (2012) | video |
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3D Rendering from Scratch in C code | gallery |
Writing
![Image credit: [1] Vincent Dumoulin, Francesco Visin - A guide to convolution arithmetic for deep learning - https://arxiv.org/abs/1603.07285](img/writing/conv.png)
What I'm Reading / Watching
Problems of Knowledge and Freedom |
Design as Participation |
 Behavior Without Utility |