EIRINI MALLIARAKI
ABOUT
eirinimalliaraki@gmail.com
Twitter, Linkedin, Substack

Technologist, researcher, and former founder. I build tools, programmes, and infrastructure at the intersection of AI, frontier science, and public-good innovation. I trained as a design engineer at Imperial College London and the Royal College of Art. Before that, a BSc in Finance from the Athens University of Economics and Business.  

Three preoccupations have shaped the past decade: how intelligence emerges and travels across minds, machines, and ecosystems; what infrastructure a field needs to translate knowledge into action; and what it means to build systems that regenerate rather than extract. I've pursued all three — across startups, research labs, national AI institutes, and philanthropy.

I’m based in London, and my email is always open to ethersamplers, epistemic humorists, and ungoogleable souls.

Other curiosities: Complex systems & memetic engineering · Extended cognition · Theorising entanglement · Radical social futures · New learning environments · Community praxis · The Arctic · Soulmaking Dharma · Planetarity · Post-human design · Collective imagination · The surreal · Science Roadmapping

CV


AUGMENTED NATURE

In collaboration with Mick Geerits, Duncan Carter and Arthur Gouillart. Illustrations by Mathilde Heu. The project was developed in close collaboration with the Morphological Computation Lab at Imperial College London.


2018


DESCRIPTION


One species goes extinct every five minutes. Over the past thirty years, 75% of all insects have disappeared. 95% of the large predatory fish that once roamed the oceans are gone. The extinction rate is now 1000 times higher than it was before humans.

Current conservation efforts are largely passive — protecting habitats, restricting human activity, and monitoring decline. Augmented Nature proposes something different: actively enhancing the capacities of so-called ecosystem engineers, the species whose behaviour creates and sustains habitats for everything else. Nature is a dynamic system. Evolution has always been driven as much by species transforming their environment as by species adapting to change. The project asks: What if we gave endangered ecosystem engineers better tools to do what they already do?

Two case studies. The first is the humpback whale — an ecosystem engineer through the whale pump mechanism, carrying nutrients from the ocean depths back to the surface via their faeces, seeding the phytoplankton that forms the base of the entire marine food web. Whales are threatened by ship collisions, ocean acidification, and the disorienting noise of ship engines interfering with their vocalisations. The proposed bio-logging tag attaches to the whale like existing data-logging devices, but goes further: it contains an underwater speaker that can communicate with the whale through sound, informing it of nearby ships and nudging it away from shipping lanes. By strategically repositioning, whales can transfer nutrients and create new habitats outside harm's reach.
How may it work?
Humpbacks are feeding in dangerous, noisy shipping lanes.



Sound from the tags nudges the whales away from ships.


Whales can now strategically transfer nutrients and create new habitats.







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