Stuart Russell

Spoke Lead, Berkeley

BIOGRAPHY

Stuart Russell received his B.A. with first-class honours in physics from Oxford University in 1982 and his Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford in 1986. He then joined the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley, where he is Professor (and formerly Chair) of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences and holder of the Smith-Zadeh Chair in Engineering. 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 World Technology Award (Policy category), the Mitchell Prize of the American Statistical Association, and Outstanding Educator Awards from both ACM and AAAI. From 2012 to 2014 he held the Chaire Blaise Pascal in Paris. He is a Fellow of the American Association for 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 13 languages and is used in over 1300 universities in 118 countries. 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 also works for the United Nations, developing a new global seismic monitoring system for the 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.

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Stuart Russell

Resources

The Off-Switch Game

The Off-Switch Game International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI, Stockholm, 2018 It is clear that one of the primary tools we can use to mitigate the potential risk from a misbehaving AI system is the ability to turn the system off. As the capabilities of AI systems improve, it is important to ensure that […]

What is the purpose of AI? Professor Stuart Russell

A short interview with Stuart Russell filmed at the CFI conference in July 2017. Download Film

What is the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence?

What is the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence? Filmed at the first conference of LCFI which took place in July 2017 at Jesus College, Cambridge. Interviewees include: Murray Shanahan, Christina Demetriades (Accenture), Stuart Russell, Rob McCargow (PWC), Francesca Rossi, Alan Winfield, Claire Craig (Royal Society), Zoubin Ghahramani, Jullian Huppert, Jake Elwes (Digital Artist). […]

Projects

Stuart Russell

The Value Alignment Problem

The Value Alignment Project seeks to design methods for preventing AI systems from inadvertently acting in ways inimical to human values. AI systems will operate with increasing autonomy and capability in complex domains in the real world. How can we ensure that they have the right behavioural dispositions – the goals or ‘values’ needed to […]