The impossible desire to fully live the human experience.
Abutalha Alam
I'm Abutalha. 21. Raised in Limerick, Ireland and usually based in Dublin, Ireland. I recently finished Computational Social Science at UCD, after spending the last few years bouncing between startups, research, travelling, writing, and whatever else seemed worth getting hyperfixated on.
Lately I've been obsessing over agentic social intelligence: what artificial minds need to know about one another, how they remember people and relationships over time, what happens when those relationships become groups, and eventually how groups become institutions and societies.
At heart, I'm a technologist with a love for the arts and humanities. I love computers because they're the closest thing I know to magic, but most of the questions I care about tend to end up being about people and long-term human progress.
I spend the rest of my time writing, filming, travelling, building things, and generally just following whatever seems interesting enough.
The best way to contact me is through my email:
abutalhaprojects at gmail dot
com
Research
My current research is on social intelligence in artificial systems: how agents understand one another, remember past interactions, form relationships, coordinate in groups, and eventually develop larger social structures.
Most of the detailed work is staying private while I develop and test it. I write more openly about the surrounding questions, literature and experiments on Synthetic Society.
My exchange at NTU Singapore turned into a much wider period travelling through Asia. It changed a lot about how I think about culture, development, institutions, technology, and the different ways people organise a life.
I'm not entirely sure whether this site is acting as a portfolio, notebook, or an archive. whatever yolo
See where I've been →