Serene Lim — a digital garden

After Martin Johnson Heade · Cattleya Orchid and Three Hummingbirds · 1871

The orchid · Bio

Rooted in many places,
growing in London.

Hello, I'm Serene. By title, Chief of Staff at DeepFlow and AMAAMS; in practice, AI general purpose nerd (as coined by Simon Johnson). One month it is partnerships, the next, product, or the enablement work to build ambitious projects.

I came to this by way of building rooms for other people to meet in. At UCL I founded the AI Foundry, the university's first AI incubator: we started from scratch and ended with over 150 participants, 40 mentors, and demo days at Google and Microsoft. Around it, years of partnerships and ecosystem work across the AI, climate, and startup communities of London and Singapore. The research I am proudest of, a prize-winning study of fairness in large language models, asked how the systems we build inherit our blind spots. That is still the question underneath most I do: whether AI can be built responsibly, and pointed at problems actually worth solving.

I was born in Malaysia and grew up between Seattle and Singapore, and for now have settled, as much as a third-culture kid ever settles, in London. I love all things interdisciplinary, the theatre, planet-centred AI, and baked goods. And I keep a small garden, because after a day of tending an ecosystem you cannot touch, there is real relief in soil.

The tree · Projects

Things I've grown
from seed.

/branch—01 · research · arXiv

Implicit Biases in LLM Open-ended Text Generation

Prize-winning UCL research introducing psychology-inspired tests for machines — showing that models which pass explicit bias checks still carry implicit biases that shape their decisions.

/branch—02 · investigation · interactive

Funded Britain

A personal investigation into how the UK's £88 billion of research and innovation funding moves, and who it leaves behind. Four sources, one Sankey, and the £2 in every £100 that started it.

/branch—03 · still growing