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Ifeoma Nwosu-Howard

Long-tenured contributor

Based in Lagos
Node-cell lebesgue-22
ORCID 0000-4109-6667-6500

Research

Ifeoma is the lead author of the debate-plus-trace paper and the contributor most often associated with the lab's approach to scalable oversight. Her thesis at UCL was on argumentation frameworks; the debate-plus-trace protocol is, in part, a careful adaptation of classical argumentation to the multi-step agentic setting.

She is one of the contributors who has spent the most time on what she calls 'the second author problem': how does a debate-based system handle the case where one of the debaters is itself a strong agent that can construct convincing-but-wrong trace reconstructions. The v2 of the debate-plus-trace protocol incorporates her early answers to that problem.

Ifeoma is based in Lagos. She splits time between the lab and a fellowship with a policy research group; she is careful to label which writing belongs to which affiliation.

Background

Ph.D. computer science, University College London, 2014. Undergraduate at University of Lagos.

Prior to alphabell: UCL; Halcyon Safety; Brookings AI Policy Center.

Selected publications

Full publications index →

Recent talks

  • What makes a trace adjudicable, NeurIPS 2025
  • Oversight under capability asymmetry, ICLR 2025
Working with

Ifeoma is currently part of node-cell lebesgue-22, working under the Interpretability & alignment research axis. The cell is open to substantive correspondence from researchers working on adjacent problems; route requests through lebesgue-22@alphabell.com or directly to Ifeoma at ifeoma-nwosu-howard@alphabell.com.