AI Research Talks @ Percepta #2 · Luma

Shahan Ali Memon (@shahanmemon.bsky.social)

Researching {science of AI-mediated science, metascience #SciSci, #AI4Science, #GenAI, LLMs, agents, alignment, AI governance, misinformation in science} PhD @ UW. Visiting @ NYU & MSR Alum @ Carnegie Mellon Academic webpage: https://samemon.github.io

No. 030: Google Deep Review, AI research taste, AI in dissertations - The Hallway Track

The Hallway Track No. 030 - How AI is affecting the practice of science

AI-powered research talks

Discover, run, and publish academic talks as AI-enhanced, citable video that increases visibility, engagement and citations.

Research Scientist – World Modeling

WHO WE ARE Percepta’s mission is to transform critical institutions with applied AI. We care that industries that power the world (e.g. healthcare, manufacturing, energy) benefit from frontier technology. To make that happen, we embed with industry-leading customers to drive AI transformation. We bring together: https://challenge.percepta.ai - Forward-deployed expertise in engineering, product, and research - Mosaic, our in-house toolkit for rapidly deploying agentic workflows - Strategic partnerships with Anthropic, McKinsey, AWS, companies within the General Catalyst portfolio, and more Our team is a quickly growing group of Applied AI Engineers, Embedded Product Managers and Researchers motivated by diffusing the promise of AI into improvements we can feel in our day to day lives. Percepta is a direct partnership with General Catalyst, a global transformation and investment company. ABOUT THE ROLE As a Research Scientist - World Modeling at Percepta, you'll build the systems that let us understand an operation at its full complexity. Real operations rarely arrive as clean, structured data: the ground truth about the operation lives scattered across claims, clinical notes, call transcripts, contracts, and the tacit judgment of operators. You'll build models and agents that learn to compress this mess into a tractable, continuously-updated representation — effectively a digital twin of the operation — that forecasters, user models, and optimizers downstream can all reason and plan against. RESPONSIBILITIES - Design and build learned world models that compress messy, multi-modal operational data (notes, transcripts, contracts, telemetry) into tractable, decision-relevant representations. - Model the transition dynamics of real operations — how a workforce, facility, or network evolves state-to-state — so downstream systems can run counterfactuals before a decision touches a real person or asset. - Build and validate digital twins of customer operations, benchmarked against replayable, real-world testbeds with defensible ground truth. - Partner closely with the forecasting and optimization teams to ensure your representations are the right substrate for calibrated predictions and for finding optimal actions. - Bridge research into practice by partnering with engineers to deploy world models into live customer environments and push toward end-to-end production systems. You may be a good fit if you: - PhD degree in Computer Science, Operations Research, Industrial Engineering, or Applied Mathematics or have equivalent research/industry experience. - Have depth in simulation or world modeling - Have experience in novel machine learning techniques for control and optimization, including test-time search and reinforcement learning for sequential decision-making. - Are comfortable implementing and debugging large-scale optimization systems, and designing benchmarks with real, defensible ground truth. - Are motivated by impact in critical industries including healthcare, supply chains, energy, and finance. - Have a proven track record of execution. - Are an excellent communicator with both technical and non-technical stakeholders. - Enjoy extreme ownership. - Are passionate about AI's transformative potential ABOUT OUR TEAM As an organization, Percepta is committed to inclusion and belonging, and our people are our greatest investment! We’re working against an incredibly ambitious mission. It won’t be easy, but it will likely be the most fulfilling work of your career. In addition to competitive compensation, equity, 401(k) matching, comprehensive health and family benefits, and lunch every day, we offer a culture built on autonomy and trust. We strongly believe that the boldest solutions come from teams who dream bigger together, and that means bringing in people from every kind of background, experience, and path. We are an office-first team that values the impact of in-person collaboration, but we focus on outcomes over outputs—believing that we are each responsible for solving the "whole problem" to make our customers win. If you don't check every box on this description but you care deeply about the problems we're tackling, seeking the truth, and wanting to own outcomes alongside a team that has your back, then we want to hear from you! We know self-doubt keeps great people from applying, so please don't count yourself out before we've had the chance to meet you. Tackling the hardest problems takes a range of perspectives in the room, and we believe that's how we build something truly game-changing. Our company values are more than just words on a page. They inform how our team shows up every day: OUR VALUES Dream bigger: We have the unique privilege of taking on the most ambitious problems and we should chase them with optimism, responsibility, and genuine belief that we can make it happen. We have to embrace the hard things when no one else will. Heart in the game: What we're doing matters and we have to give a shit. Internally, that means fixing badness when you find it. Externally, it means honoring the trust our customers place in us with their most important problems. This isn’t a 9-5, nor is it a job we’re ever going to monitor your hours. We promise to put work in front of you that matters and in return, we ask you to promise to care. Win for the customer: Everyone is an engineer and the job of an engineer is to deliver outcomes, not outputs. Everything we do—the products we build, the partnerships we launch, the strategy we set—exists to make our customers successful. Delivery is the strategy. Make the call: Organizations are only as strong as the pace at which they make decisions. Everyone at Percepta should feel empowered to commit and shape the ambiguity in front of them. But "make the call" cuts both ways: make the decision and make the phone call. High-agency decision-making only works with high-bandwidth communication and we commit to never operate in silos. Intensity with kindness: We believe in excellence in execution, candor in feedback, ruthlessness in prioritization, and survivalist urgency. We also believe you don't need to be an asshole to deliver on any of this. The trust built through shared kindness and vulnerability is what makes the intensity sustainable. Percepta is proud to be an equal opportunity employer and we evaluate every qualified applicant on their merits and give equal consideration for employment regardless of race, color, creed, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, veteran or uniformed service status, age, or any other characteristic protected under applicable law. Percepta provides reasonable accommodations to qualified applicants and employees in accordance with federal and applicable state law.

The AI Roles Continuum: Blurring the Boundary Between Research and...

The rapid scaling of deep neural networks and large language models has collapsed the once-clear divide between "research" and "engineering" in AI organizations. Drawing on a qualitative synthesis...

How to talk about "AI" without adding to the anthropomorphization

Emily M. Bender and Nanna Inie In our op-ed for Tech Policy Press ("We Need to Talk About How We Talk About 'AI'"), we made the case against the...

More Than a Tool

What We Learned from a Year of Conversations About AI

Breaking Points Interview: w/ AI Researcher Nate Soares on Slowing AI Development (Transcript) – The Singju Post

KRYSTAL BALL: (00:00:00 – 00:00:12) For more on what is going on right now in AI world, we are rejoined by Nate Soares. He is the president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and also co-author of the great book, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. Great to see you again, Nate.

State of AI Report 2025

The State of AI Report analyses the most interesting developments in AI. Read and download here.

The 2026 AI Index Report | Stanford HAI

Get the latest news, advances in research, policy work, and education program updates from HAI in your inbox weekly.

LukeW | Rethinking Networking for the AI/ML Era

In her AI Speaker Series presentation at Sutter Hill Ventures, Google Distinguished Engineer Nandita Dukkipati explained how AI/ML workloads have completely bro...

How to build an AI scientist: first peer-reviewed paper spills the secrets

AI Scientist, an autonomous research tool, first released in 2024, has now undergone peer review, highlighting its strengths and limitations.

Whisper

Your true lifelong AI partner

NBER on Twitter / X

Nearly one-third of US STEM PhD students now write their dissertations with AI. Rarer at top programs, more common for non-native English speakers. AI users are more likely to enter industry, from @daniel_p_gross, @DShvadron, and @HansenZhang13 https://t.co/1M3LhTSbIa pic.twitter.com/ur0w0RENnx— NBER (@nberpubs) October 9, 2026

AI for Science Curation

Knowing exactly who to talk to or what to read