Deputy Director & Senior Research Associate

Dr Micha Kaiser serves as a Senior Research Associate at both the YNOT Institute at Queens’ College and the El-Erian Institute at Cambridge Judge Business School. His role extends to being an External Lecturer at Copenhagen Business School (CBS), where he specializes in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning.
Prior to his engagement at Cambridge, Micha was instrumental in developing courses on machine learning, statistics, and consumer research as an Assistant Professor at CBS in Copenhagen. His research interests lie at the intersection of health policy, consumer behavior, and behavioral public policy, leveraging quantitative models and the application of AI. Micha currently leads the YNOT Institute's PREDICT project, which is dedicated to examining the predictability of outcomes in behavioral policy interventions. Micha is a proponent of integrating emerging AI technologies in policy-making, advocating that the most effective policies are those that synergize with, rather than resist, the advancements in AI.

Research Associate

Dr Peter Ochieng is an inaugural DeepMind Research Fellow in the Computer Science and Technology department at the University of Cambridge. His technical expertise is in Natural Language Processing (NLP), focusing on low-resource languages. He is also interested in speech synthesis that is agnostic to accents and low-resource acoustic features. Peter is part or the PREDICT project where the goal is to exploit machine learning techniques to make LLMs to simulate human behaviours when subjected to certain nudges; through having a normal chat with finetuned LLMs, we hope to get an impression of how humans will respond to certain nudges. 

PhD student

Billy Shi is a PhD student in Engineering at Queens’ College. His research interest is designing interactive generative AI systems for software engineering, behavioural science and education.

Research Assistant

Colleen Sheridan is a Natural Scientist and Psychologist by training, with a technical background in data science and AI. Her research interests are at the intersection of behavioural psychology, and AI interpretability. At the YNOT, Colleen works on the PREDICT II project, building a harmonised dataset of behavioural interventions, and building an agentic research system to understand model behaviour within academic settings. 

PhD student

Lara Greening is currently studying for a PhD in Psychology at Queens’ college. Her PhD, supervised by Professor Lucia Reisch and Dr Lee de Wit, focuses on using machine learning to predict voting behaviour and political ideology. Lara’s research interests include data science, machine learning, computational social science, and the application of machine learning to improve society. She works on the PREDICT project, exploring the effectiveness of classical machine learning algorithms in comparison to LLMs.