The Alignment Journal: Organization, Personnel, and Scope

Summary

[Cross-posted from the Alignment Journal's blog] The Alignment Journal is beginning to invite the authors of select papers to submit their work for review. If you are interested in participating as an action editor or a reviewer, make an account on our website; if you have a manuscript that you think would be a good fit for the Journal at this stage, email [email protected] to request an invitation to submit. Manuscripts under review will become visible on our homepage, and you will be able to nominate yourself as a reviewer of a specific paper that interests you. We plan to open up submissions to everyone sometime in October. Here we announce the Journal's inaugural senior editorial board, advisory board, staff, organizational structure, and initial scope. We welcome questions and proposed changes to help us refine the scope in the future. Personnel The Journal is run by its senior editorial board, which makes the Journal's scholarly decisions, and two managing editors, who run operations and strategy. The advisory board offers high-level guidance without editorial responsibilities. A software lead and a head of operations support the team. The senior editorial board (8 editors at launch, covering a range of alignment expertise) has authority over all of the Journal's scholarly decisions and over approving and removing senior editors. The board focuses its attention on policy, standards, borderline cases, and appeals as it builds trust in the review process by fostering a strong culture of rigorous and impartial review. Senior editors may choose to handle the manuscripts themselves, but usually recruit an action editor (analogous to an area chair at a conference) who will be responsible for leading the review process for that submission, while the senior editors supervises. The full board of senior editors handle appeals and other contentious issues. The Journal startup effort is being spearheaded by managing editors Jess Riedel and Dan MacKinlay, who have initial authority over operational and strategic decisions, preparing policy proposals for the senior editorial board but deferring to the senior editors on scholarly decisions. Editorial policy (such as refining the Journal scope, making acceptance decisions, and accepting new editors) will be decided by consensus of the full senior editorial board until a formal governance system is adopted. As the Journal takes on operations staff and eventually an editor-in-chief, this work should ultimately transfer to them. The advisory board (7 advisors at launch) is composed of senior researchers who give high-level strategic advice to the managing and senior editors. Advisors do not normally handle papers or make editorial decisions, but they have a full window into the Journal's operations and the editorial process. If they agree to take on the additional role of ombudsman, an advisory board member may hear complaints against senior editors and managing editors. The ombudsman role exists to ensure that complaints are heard by non-conflicted people. The software lead, Yonatan Cale, has responsibility for creating and operating the Journal's software stack, including its new editorial management system designed to support the Journal's unique features. The head of operations, Kristi Uustalu, manages communications, organization, scheduling, and finances, and interfaces with the Journal's parent organization, Principles of Intelligence. The Journal also receives occasional assistance from the staff of its sister project, ILIAD, and from Principles of Intelligence. Advisory board Scott Aaronson is a Professor of Computer Science at UT Austin and the founding director of its Quantum Information Center. He researches computational complexity theory and quantum computing, including boson sampling, postselection, and the limits of quantum speedups. As a visiting researcher at OpenAI, he worked on theoretical foundations for AI safety, including AI-output watermarking. He also created the Complexity Zoo and authored Quantum Computing Since Democritus. Links: personal website; blog; Google Scholar profile; DBLP page; UT Austin profile page. Paul Christiano is a Founder of the Alignment Research Center (ARC) and, at OpenAI, the originator of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF); he also launched the third-party frontier-model evaluation effort now housed at METR. His research develops scalable oversight and alignment methods — including debate, iterated amplification, and eliciting latent knowledge — for supervising systems whose behavior humans cannot directly check. He has served as Head of AI Safety at the US AI Safety Institute (NIST). Links: personal website; blog; Google Scholar profile; Alignment Forum profile; LessWrong profile. Vince Conitzer is a Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, where he directs the Foundations of Cooperative AI Lab (FOCAL). His foundational work in computational social choice, game theory, an