Curriculum vitae
Steven Spratley, PhD
AI alignment · Cognitive science · Philosophy of Mind · Artificial life
Profile
Research Engineer in Machine Reasoning at Advanced Systems & Technologies, Lockheed Martin
Australia. My research connects machine learning, cognitive science, and philosophical
questions about abstraction, agency, and the conditions for reliable reasoning.
I engineer machine minds to remain coherent and worthy of trust.
Experience
Research Engineer, Machine Reasoning
Internal R&D applying machine learning to real-time decision-making, including decentralised swarm behaviours.
Academic Supervisor, Master of Data Science Capstone
Supervised industry capstone teams from project conception through to final presentation.
Academic Tutor and Game Environment Designer, AI Planning for Autonomy
Developed game simulators, interfaces, and competitive benchmark agents for a cohort of more than 400 master's students.
PhD top-up recipient and research intern
Doctoral research and a literature review of intelligent decision systems for human-in-the-loop scenarios.
Research Assistant, Natural Language Processing
Developed tools for heterogeneous historical dates in museum collection records.
Education
PhD, Artificial Intelligence · 2024
Perceptual abstraction and analogical reasoning in vision systems. Supervisors: Tim Miller and Kris Ehinger.
MSc, Computer Science, with Distinction · 2018
A unified neural approach to instrumental audio tasks. Supervisor: Trevor Cohn. First Class Honours and Dean's Honours (top 5%).
BSc, Computing and Software Systems · 2015
Computing and software systems.
Diploma of Screen and Media · 2011
Cohort award for best cinematography, for the student film Leaving.
Research skills
- Machine learning and reinforcement learning with Python, PyTorch, and JAX; architectures for vision, audio, and swarm behaviours.
- Visual reasoning benchmarks, representation analysis, and methods for examining learned concepts.
- Graph-of-thought scaffolds and tree-search harnesses for language models.
- Evolutionary methods, artificial life, and ecological approaches to emergent intelligence.
- Human experiments and annotated-data collection using PsychoPy, Pavlovia, and Prolific.
- Research supervision, teaching, and communication across technical and interdisciplinary audiences.
Selected publications & talks
Learning Adaptive Swarm Behaviours for Decentralised Control
Steven Spratley · Principal investigator
Australian Defence Science, Technology and Research Summit (ADSTAR) · 2024 · published
On the Use of Progressive Matrix Problems in Understanding Abstraction and Generalisation in Vision Systems
Steven Spratley
PhD thesis, The University of Melbourne · 2024 · completed
Unicode Analogies: An Anti-Objectivist Visual Reasoning Challenge
Steven Spratley, Krista A. Ehinger, Tim Miller
IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) · 2023 · published
A Closer Look at Generalisation in RAVEN
Steven Spratley, Krista Ehinger, Tim Miller
European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) · 2020 · published
A Unified Neural Architecture for Instrumental Audio Tasks
Steven Spratley, Daniel Beck, Trevor Cohn
IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) · 2019 · published
Working papers
When Ecologies Become Minds: Integration, general intelligence, and alignment
Steven Spratley
1 October 2026
Wormtongue and the White Wizard: Uncovering Cognitive Biases with Tree Search
Steven Spratley
September 2026
Interdisciplinary practice
Consultant, Jujutsu Project
The University of Melbourne × Yumi Umiumare · February 2023
An intercultural arts project supported by Creative Victoria, exploring shamanism, secularism, and science.
Consultant, Collision Commission
The University of Melbourne × Science Gallery Melbourne · December 2020–March 2021
Interactive art installations developed with an interdisciplinary team led by Robert Walton at the Victorian College of the Arts.
Sound Designer, The 39 Steps
3D Arts Company · May–August 2015
Sound design and audio engineering for a theatre production at Metanoia Theatre.