Nesta and the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) are hosting two artificial intelligence (AI) residents as part of the second round of our residency programme.

The residents will support Nesta and BIT to understand how we could safely apply generative AI in our areas of work. They will be helping us to identify use cases for this technology, prototyping tools and ways of working based on generative AI and considering the wider strategic consequences of these technologies for our work.

We’re thrilled to introduce you to our two AI residents.

Kostas is Nesta's AI resident hosted by the Discovery team, helping prototype generative AI use cases for Nesta's missions and work.

In his main job, Kostas leads machine learning at Util. He works on machine learning infrastructure and builds models to measure the social and environmental impact of publicly traded companies. Before Util, Kostas was an open science fellow at Mozilla where he worked on interactive information retrieval. He developed a knowledge discovery platform for academic publications that combined a neural search engine with data visualisation. Born in Athens, Greece, Kostas holds a BSc in economics, an MSc in data science and a black belt in Kung Fu.

What are you working on at the moment at Nesta?

Kostas says: “Together with the Discovery team, I am exploring how generative AI, specifically large language models, can be used for social good. We have been building a series of prototypes related to Nesta’s fairer start mission – including a chatbot that recommends activities to do with children in early-years education. I am currently prototyping another chatbot that helps people learn more about pregnancy, babies and parenting.

“Overall, we want to provide reliable information from trusted sources so in this case we have collected all articles from the NHS Start for Life and we use a large language model to make it easier to search and aggregate relevant content.”

What excites you the most about your residency project?

“I’m very fortunate to have access to domain experts who provide valuable feedback to the prototypes and a supportive team to brainstorm ideas. I enjoy working in the open (our code is open source!) and experimenting with the latest tech. Also, the Nesta folks are a lovely bunch!”

Dan is the AI resident hosted by the design and technology practice, helping prototype generative AI use cases for both Nesta and BIT.

Dan is a full-stack web engineer with a background in machine learning and natural language processing. His time is split between building tools with large language models, consulting for companies on generative AI and running the climate donations non-profit tythe.org. Dan has a website about his latest projects.

What are you working on at the moment at Nesta?

Dan says: “I'm exploring the potential for new tools and interventions in a range of domains across BIT and building quick prototypes as I go. Right now I'm focussing on an internal tool to help teams stay up to date with emerging research in their respective fields.

“The tool pulls in academic papers from 30 different journals, then filters and categorises the papers according to BIT's policy areas. These curated lists will be summarised, probably with human and AI input, to form monthly digests specific to each team.

“Other prototypes I'm working on have potential for application externally: in government services, secondary education and recruitment.”

What excites you the most about your residency project?

“It's a privilege to be in the office meeting people across Nesta and BIT, learning about their areas of work and seeing how generative AI is being used nine months after the release of ChatGPT. There's no shortage of innovative ideas to explore and I'm enjoying the process of rapidly prototyping tools which wouldn't have been feasible a year ago.

“I'm building up a picture of how large language models might affect the organisations at a strategic level and I'm excited to see the tools we're working on have an impact not just internally, but also for partners and further afield.”

Read about the school food residents who joined us in Wales to help us work out how best to give children access to healthy and appetising school food.