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Stylised avatar of Ruth Wernicke

Ruth Wernicke

Long-tenured contributor

Based in Vienna
Node-cell lebesgue-22
ORCID 0000-5476-7871-2890

Research

Ruth works on specification inference — the question of how to construct formal specifications from observed agent traces, so that future runs can be checked against specifications nobody has had to write by hand. The work shares tooling with the verification framework and the mechanistic-interpretability stack; Ruth is one of the contributors who works comfortably across all three.

She co-authored the debate-plus-trace result and is one of the named contributors to the verifiable-policies paper. Her Ph.D. was on relational specifications in distributed systems; the lab's current specification work is recognisably an extension of that.

Ruth is based in Vienna. She is one of the most active reviewers on the cross-axis methodology review pool and has a habit of asking, on first read of a new methodology, 'what is the smallest counter-example.'

Background

Ph.D. mathematical logic, TU Vienna, 2015.

Prior to alphabell: TU Vienna; Cantor Initiative; Wayfarer Institute.

Selected publications

Full publications index →

Recent talks

  • Specifications from traces, FM 2025
  • What pairing reveals about specifications, ML Safety Workshop 2024
Working with

Ruth 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 Ruth at ruth-wernicke@alphabell.com.