I'm starting my Honours next year, and would like to do something towards helping MIRI with Friendly AI. I would also prefer to avoid duplicating any of MIRI's work (either already done, or needed to be done before my honours are finished midway through 2015). I decided to post this here rather than directly email MIRI as I guessed a list of potential projects would probably be useful for others as well (in fact, I was sure such a thing had already been posted, but I was unable to find it if it did in fact exist). So: what sort of Friendly AI related projects are there that could potentially be done by one person in a year of work? (I suppose it would make sense to include PhD-length suggestions here as well).
Some notes about me and my abilities: I am reasonably good with math, though my understanding of probability, model theory and provability logic are lacking (I will have a few months before hand that I plan to use to try and learn whatever maths I will need that I don't already have). I am a competent Haskell programmer, and (besides AI) I am interested in dependent type systems, total languages, and similar methods of proving certain program errors cannot occur, although I would have to do some background research to learn more of the state of the art in that field. I would (hesitantly) guess that this would be the best avenue for something that a single person could do that might be useful, but I'm not sure how useful it would be.
Just to confirm, it's undergraduate CSE honors? Have you taken an AI course?
My initial impression is that you'll have trouble doing something specifically related to FAI, but it depends on your background.
I haven't heard the term CSE before (computer science & engineering?), but I'm doing a Bachelor of Science, majoring in Computer Science and minoring in Mathematics. I am taking an AI course at the moment (actually, its a combined AI/data mining course, and it's a bit shallower than I would like, but it covers the basics).