Stuart is a professor of Computer Science, EECS and holds the Smith-Zadeh Chair in Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.
His research covers a wide range of topics in artificial intelligence including machine learning, probabilistic reasoning, knowledge representation, planning, real-time decision making, multitarget tracking, computer vision, computational physiology, and philosophical foundations. He has also worked with the United Nations to create a new global seismic monitoring system for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty.
His current concerns include the threat of autonomous weapons and the long-term future of artificial intelligence and its relation to humanity. The latter topic is the subject of his new book, “Human Compatible: AI and the Problem of Control” (Viking/Penguin, 2019), which was excerpted in the New York Times and listed among Best Books of 2019 by the Guardian, Forbes, the Daily Telegraph, and the Financial Times.
Stuart Russell received his B.A. with first-class honours in physics from Oxford University and his Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford. He then joined the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley, where he is Professor and Director of the Center for Human-Compatible AI. He has served as an Adjunct Professor of Neurological Surgery at UC San Francisco and as Vice-Chair of the World Economic Forum’s Council on AI and Robotics. He is a recipient of the Presidential Young Investigator Award of the National Science Foundation, the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award, the IJCAI Research Excellence Award, the World Technology Award (Policy category), the Mitchell Prize of the American Statistical Association, the Feigenbaum Prize of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, and Outstanding Educator Awards from both ACM and AAAI. From 2012 to 2014 he held the Chaire Blaise Pascal in Paris, and from 2019 to 2021 he held the Andrew Carnegie Fellowship.
In 2021 he was appointed by Her Majesty The Queen as an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (OBE) and was selected as Reith Lecturer.
He is an Honorary Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford; Distinguished Fellow of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI; Associate Fellow of the Royal Institute for International Affairs (Chatham House); and Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
His book “Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach” (with Peter Norvig) is the standard text in AI; it has been translated into 14 languages and is used in 1500 universities in 135 countries.
He’s been thinking about the AI Safety problem for longer than most and his work around Human Compatible AI is probably the closest thing humanity has to one approach to a solution to a subset of the AI Alignment Category problems (a gentle introduction to Cooperative Inverse Reinforcement Learning can be found here)
🚨 AI Doomer Post of the Day 🤖
— AAWSAP Ferb (@AAWSAPRocky) May 9, 2024
—
"We don't understand how these systems work, we don't know what they're capable of, and that means that we can't control them."
—
British Computer Scientist Stuart Russell on signing a letter requesting a halt on AI systems past ChatGPT 4… pic.twitter.com/1OzMyQN8aw
Stuart Russell, author of the AI textbook, says AI takeover risk deniers like @ylecun make “embarrassing” arguments “even a 5 year old can see through”
— AI Notkilleveryoneism Memes ⏸️ (@AISafetyMemes) July 18, 2024
Why?
Cope.
"Yann Lecun keeps saying, well, you know, there's only going to be a problem if we put in self-preservation as an… https://t.co/84dIFTdTq1 pic.twitter.com/b8YixSgDPl
