Mar 10, 2025
BlueDot Impact Connect: A Comprehensive AI Safety Community Platform
Elise Racine, Aliya Koishina, Aishwarya Gurung, Tatenda Mawema, Haihao Liu
Track: Public Education
The AI safety field faces a critical challenge: while formal education resources are growing, personalized guidance and community connections remain scarce, especially for newcomers from diverse backgrounds. We propose BlueDot Impact Connect, a comprehensive AI Safety Community Platform designed to address this gap by creating a structured environment for knowledge transfer between experienced AI safety professionals and aspiring contributors, while fostering a vibrant community ecosystem. The platform will employ a sophisticated matching algorithm for mentorship that considers domain-specific expertise areas, career trajectories, and mentorship styles to create meaningful connections. Our solution features detailed AI safety-specific profiles, showcasing research publications, technical skills, specialized course completions, and research trajectories to facilitate optimal mentor-mentee pairings. The integrated community hub enables members to join specialized groups, participate in discussions, attend events, share resources, and connect with active members across the field. By implementing this platform with BlueDot Impact's community of 4,500+ professionals across 100+ countries, we anticipate significant improvements in mentee career trajectory clarity, research direction refinement, and community integration. We propose that by formalizing the mentorship process and creating robust community spaces, all accessible globally, this platform will help democratize access to AI safety expertise while creating a pipeline for expanding the field's talent pool—a crucial factor in addressing the complex challenge of catastrophic AI risk mitigation.
This work shows a clear engagement with the problem, and a well-thought out approach to addressing key issues. Additional literature to support the choice of questions for interview design (for early testers) would further support this submission. I am also interested in hearing more about how the authors would navigate questions around user privacy and confidentiality (if desired), and which projects would be prioritized if the BlueDot Impact Connect team faced capacity constraints. For example, the mentor matching requires deep domain knowledge in order to appropriately match based on research interests and research contributions. Additionally, I am curious about the technical implementation of the solution, such as the matching algorithm (if done automatically) and/or the type of support provided to mentors to support them to deliver excellent mentoring with their limited time. As a public education project, the submission relies heavily on the strength of the mentor matching algorithm, and the skill of the mentors, and it would be great to see more information on these elements if the project develops further.
Amazing work! I'm also so happy to see the BlueDot community working together here!
Here are some things I particularly enjoyed:
- Beautiful and sleek UI!
- Spot on formulation of the problem with community and mentorship in the AI safety space. One other thing to explore is why have previous efforts of creating such a community not been sufficient. For example, there are several discord communities.
Here are some things I thought could be improved:
- I would have loved to learn more about how the mentors and mentees would be matched!
- Although the tiered mentorship model helps to alleviate some of the mentor bottleneck, I wonder if you considered other ways to incentivise mentors to participate. Similarly, it might be useful to chat with potential mentors to understand their challenges with being a mentor (e.g. time, worry about a bad match, poor past experience with mentorship).
I love these ideas and if I had to give one piece of advice, it would be to just pick one piece of this to work on further rather than try to tackle all 5 elements of the community hub AND connect at once. Build something that doesn't scale and test it out to see if it works!
Cite this work
@misc {
title={
BlueDot Impact Connect: A Comprehensive AI Safety Community Platform
},
author={
Elise Racine, Aliya Koishina, Aishwarya Gurung, Tatenda Mawema, Haihao Liu
},
date={
3/10/25
},
organization={Apart Research},
note={Research submission to the research sprint hosted by Apart.},
howpublished={https://apartresearch.com}
}
