Ben Harack

Studying international AI governance

Some things I’ve worked on.

Improving medical diagnosis

Nikolas Zöller, Julian Berger, Irving Lin, Nathan Fu, Jayanth Komarneni, Gioele Barabucci, Kyle Laskowski, Victor Shia, Benjamin Harack, Eugene Chu, Vito Trianni, Ralf Kurvers, and Stefan Herzog. “Human-AI collectives produce the most accurate differential diagnoses.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.14981 (2024).
Gioele Barabucci, Victor Shia, Eugene Chu, Benjamin Harack, Kyle Laskowski, and Nathan Fu. ‘Combining Multiple Large Language Models Improves Diagnostic Accuracy’. NEJM AI (17 October 2024). https://doi.org/10.1056/AIcs2400502.

Global governance strategy

Harack, B., Laskowski, K., Bailey, R., Marcotte, J., Jaques, S., Datta, D., and Kuski, S., 2017. Ruling ourselves: The deliberate evolution of global cooperation and governance. New Shape Library, Global Challenges Foundation. (nicely formatted version here)
- An interdisciplinary effort to present a new macrostrategy for tackling the intertwined problems of technological existential risk and global governance.
The cooperation possibility frontier - one way to visualize the difficulty of achieving international agreements.

Urban policy

Energy sustainability (electric grid, natural gas)

Patent: Identifying electric vehicle owners (2014)
Analysis reports for the Opower blog (now offline). One received coverage in the New York Times.
Blog posts at Vision of Earth, such as this review (2011).

Condensed matter physics (semiconductors)

Cooper, D.R., D’Anjou, B., Ghattamaneni, N., Harack, B., Hilke, M., Horth, A., Majlis, N., Massicotte, M., Vandsburger, L., Whiteway, E. and Yu, V., 2012. Experimental review of graphene. ISRN Condensed Matter Physics, 2012. doi:10.5402/2012/501686
- A widely-cited review of the experimental properties of graphene.
My thesis: Energy level mixing and hyperfine effects in double vertical quantum dots (2012).
Other papers:
- Harack, B., Leary, A., Coish, W.A., Hilke, M., Yu, G., Payette, C., Gupta, J.A. and Austing, D.G., 2013, December. Power spectra and auto correlation analysis of hyperfine-induced long period oscillations in the tunneling current of coupled quantum dots. In AIP Conference Proceedings (Vol. 1566, No. 1, pp. 237-238). American Institute of Physics.
- Leary, A., Wicha, A., Harack, B., Coish, W.A., Hilke, M., Yu, G., Payette, C., Gupta, J.A. and Austing, D.G., 2013, December. Hyperfine-induced hysteretic funnel structure in spin blockaded tunneling current of coupled vertical quantum dots at low magnetic field. In AIP Conference Proceedings (Vol. 1566, No. 1, pp. 205-206). American Institute of Physics.

Risks (and governance) of asteroid manipulation

Laskowski, K., Harack, B., Watson, A., 2019. Governing the emerging risk posed by asteroid manipulation technologies. Effective Altruism Global, San Francisco, 21–23 June.

Humanity’s long term future