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PhD Research

I am a PhD student at King’s College London and Imperial College London studying Computer Science in the Safe and Trusted AI Centre for Doctoral Training. My doctoral research is about framing “explanation” in the context of multi-agent communication so as to explicitly take into account the recipient of the explanation (who we call the explainee). This research is inherently interdisciplinary; notably involving philosophy, social science, and cognitive science.

Other Interests

Outside of my PhD research I am broadly interested in language and cognitive science. This has led me to studying the exciting field of emergent communication in reinforcement learning, and to studying inductive biases for deep learning systems that could facilitate more robust behaviour by having systems explicitly mimick cognitive functions such as analogy-making and information retrieval.

News

April 13, 2022: I am excited to announce that I will be joining Stuart Russell’s group the Center for Human Compatible AI at U.C. Berkeley this summer for a four month internship! I will be working with Justin Svegliato on a project in “AI metareasoning”.

April 7, 2022: I have won a “Best Reviewer Award” for my work reviewing papers for EmeCome@ICLR22! Thank you to the organisers for this recognition, and the gift of Fuji Sencha tea :)

April 1, 2022: My paper “Joining the Conversation: Towards Language Acquisition for Ad Hoc Team Play” written with my PhD supervisor Peter McBurney has been accepted to the the Emergent Communication Workshop at the International Conference on Learning Representations (EmeCome@ICLR22). I will lead a discussion group on the topic of the paper at the workshop.

March 27, 2021: My paper “A Measure of Explanatory Effectiveness” written with my PhD supervisor Peter McBurney has been accepted to the 1st International Workshop on Trusted Automated Decision-Making. I gave a talk at the workshop on the paper.

Dec 31, 2020: My paper “Learning to Communicate with Strangers via Channel Randomisation Methods” written with Nandi Schoots was accepted to the Emergent Communication Workshop at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (EmeCom@NeurIPS2020). You can find the source code on my GitHub.

Publications

Dylan Cope, Peter McBurney, 2022, Joining the Conversation: Towards Language Acquisition for Ad Hoc Team Play, the 5th Emergent Communication Workshop at the International Conference on Learning Representations (EmeCome@ICLR22)

Dylan Cope, Peter McBurney, 2021, A Measure of Explanatory Effectiveness, 1st International Workshop on Trusted Automated Decision-Making

Dylan Cope, Nandi Schoots, 2020, Learning to Communicate with Strangers via Channel Randomisation Methods, 4th NeurIPS Workshop on Emergent Communication