2024 BACN Early-Career Prize Lecture Many of our decisions affect other people. Our choices can decelerate climate change, stop the spread of infectious diseases, and directly help or harm others. Prosocial behaviours – decisions that help others – could contribute to reducing the impact of these challenges, yet their computational and neural mechanisms remain poorly understood. I will present recent work that examines prosocial motivation, how willing we are to incur costs to help others, prosocial learning, how we learn from the outcomes of our choices when they affect other people, and prosocial preferences, our self-reports of helping others. Throughout the talk, I will outline the possible computational and neural bases of these behaviours, and how they may differ from young adulthood to old age.

Climate change is one of our generation's greatest challenges, with increasingly severe consequences on global ecosystems and populations. Machine Learning has the potential to address many important challenges in climate change, from both mitigation (reducing its extent) and adaptation (preparing for unavoidable consequences) aspects. To present the extent of these opportunities, I will describe some of the projects that I am involved in, spanning from generative model to computer vision and natural language processing. There are many opportunities for fundamental innovation in this field, advancing the state-of-the-art in Machine Learning while ensuring that this fundamental progress translates into positive real-world impact.

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has recently shown great promise as an approach to networked system control. Arguably, one of the most difficult and important tasks for which large scale networked system control is applicable is common-pool resource (CPR) management. Crucial CPRs include arable land, fresh water, wetlands, wildlife, fish stock, forests and the atmosphere, of which proper management is related to some of society’s greatest challenges such as food security, inequality and climate change. This talk will consist of three parts. In the first, we will briefly look at climate change and how it poses a significant threat to life on our planet. In the second, we will consider the potential of multi-agent systems for climate change mitigation and adaptation. And finally, in the third, we will discuss recent research from InstaDeep into better understanding the behaviour of networked MARL systems used for CPR management. More specifically, we will see how the tools from empirical game-theoretic analysis may be harnessed to analyse the differences in networked MARL systems. The results give new insights into the consequences associated with certain design choices and provide an additional dimension of comparison between systems beyond efficiency, robustness, scalability and mean control performance.