Research Agendas

On this page, you can find research agendas of organisations and researchers from or adjacent to effective altruism. If you want a quick introduction to why effective altruism cares about causes mentioned below, see this TED video or read this article.

Meta

• Global Priorities Institute at Oxford University: research agenda
• Open Philanthropy project: Technical and Philosophical Questions That Might Affect Our Grantmaking
• The Life You Can Save: research they would like to see more of
• EA Geneva: questions related to improving institutional decision making

Human Welfare

• Happier Lives Institute: research agenda
• Qualia Research Institute: ideas for further research
• Alliance for Feeding The Earth in Disasters: research priorities and Effective Thesis research topics

Animal Welfare

• The Good Food Institute: 2020 Consumer Research Priorities
• Animal Charity Evaluators: focus areas
• Faunalytics: research agenda
• Sentience Institute: research agenda
• Wild Animal Initiative: research plan
  
  

Extinction risks + suffering risks:

Technical AI safety

• Center for Human Compatible Artifical Intelligence: focus areas
• Machine Intelligence Research Institute: Agent Foundations for Aligning Machine Intelligence with Human Interests (2017) and Alignment for Advanced Machine Learning Systems research agendas
• Effective Altruism Foundation: Cooperation, Conflict, and Transformative Artificial Intelligence: A Research Agenda (+ includes some questions related to AI governance)
• Paul Christiano’s research agenda summary (and FAQ and talk) (2018)
• Stuart Armstrong's research agenda (2019), example use and talk.
• Vanessa Kosoy's research agenda (2018)

AI governance

• AI Impacts: promising research projects and possible empirical investigations
• Governance of AI program at Future of Humanity Institute: Alan Dafoe's AI governance research agenda
• Center for a New American Security: Artificial Intelligence and Global Security Initiative Research Agenda
• Future of Life Institute: A survey of research questions for robust and beneficial AI (+ some aspects also fall into technical AI safety)
• Luke Muehlhauser’s list of research questions to improve our strategic picture of superintelligence (2014)

Other risks

• Alliance for Feeding The Earth in Disasters: research priorities and Effective Thesis research topics
• Foundational Research Institute: open research questions (+ includes some questions related to AI governance)
• Wild Animal Initiative: research agenda

Global Development

• Innovations for Poverty Action: A Research Agenda for the Next Wave of Graduation Programs
• International Growth Centre's research priorities (more detailed PDF)
• Esther Duflo's Research Agenda for Development Economics