Mr Phil Glass
Associate Lecturer (Education) in Computer Science

Summary

Philipp E. Glass is an Associate Lecturer and Doctoral Researcher @ Dept. of CompSci in Brunel, with a research focus on AI safety and robustness.

Previously he completed his CompSci undergrad at Brunel, receiving the University Prize for achieving the highest grades in his graduating year.

Currently he works on:

• Exploring alignment failures introduced by fine-tuning LLMs / Reasoning Models, for both outcome supervision (RLHF) and process supervision (CoT reasoning optimisation)
• Understanding Activation Vectors / Feature Vectors in LLMs: how optimisation pressure acts on them, their stability, their formation, and connection to Activation Steering-based interventions.

His prior work / other interests include:

• Bioinformatics, where he collaborated with the Computational Biology group:
  • to created the PyCoM database: https://pycom.brunel.ac.uk/—a public, queriable database of annotated proteins along with derived coevolution matrices
  • exploring promise of spacial k-mers (rather than sequential) for protein stability predictions
• Zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs; particularly for anonymised Proof of Personhood (PoP) protocols and blockchains (à la Monero)