Stuart Russell

Professor of EECS at UC Berkeley

Director of Kavli Center for Ethics, Science, and the Public

Pieter Abbeel

Professor of EECS at UC Berkeley

Anca Dragan

Assistant Professor of EECS at UC Berkeley
Founder, InterACT Lab

Anca Dragan got her B.Sc. in Computer Science from Jacobs University Bremen in Germany, after which she went to Carnegie Mellon for her Ph.D. in Robotics. She is now an Assistant Professor in the EECS Department at UC Berkeley. Her goal is to enable robots to work with, around, and in support of people. She runs the InterACT Lab, which focuses on algorithms for human-robot interaction—algorithms that move beyond the robot’s function in isolation, and generate robot behavior that also accounts for interaction and coordination with end-users. She also helped found and serves on the steering committee for the Berkeley AI Research (BAIR) Lab.

You can read more about Prof. Dragan’s work and accomplishments at her website.

Bart Selman

Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Cornell University

Bart Selman is a Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University; previously, he worked at AT&T Bell Laboratories. His research interests include computational sustainability, efficient reasoning procedures, planning, knowledge representation, and connections between computer science and statistical physics. He has (co-)authored over 100 publications, including six which won best paper awards. He is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

You can read more about Prof. Selman’s work and accomplishments at his website.

Emma Pierson

Assistant Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley

Joseph Halpern

Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Cornell University

Michael Wellman

Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan

Michael P. Wellman is a Professor of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Michigan. He received a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1988 for his work in qualitative probabilistic reasoning and decision-theoretic planning. From 1988 to 1992, Wellman conducted research in these areas at the USAF’s Wright Laboratory. For the past 25 years, his research has focused on computational market mechanisms and game-theoretic reasoning methods, with applications in electronic commerce, finance, and cyber-security. Wellman previously served as Chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on Electronic Commerce (SIGecom) and as Executive Editor of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research. He is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and the Association for Computing Machinery.

You can read more about Prof. Wellman’s work and accomplishments at his website.

Satinder Singh Baveja

Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan
Director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

Satinder Singh Baveja is a Professor in the Division of Computer Science and Engineering, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, as well as Director of the AI Lab there. His main research interest is in the old-fashioned goal of Artificial Intelligence (AI), that of building autonomous agents that can learn to be broadly competent in complex, dynamic, and uncertain environments. The field of reinforcement learning (RL) has focused on this goal and accordingly his deepest contributions are in RL. From time to time, he takes seriously the challenge of building agents that can interact with other agents and even humans in both artificial and natural environments. This has led to research in computational game theory / mechanism design, cognitive science, and human-computer interaction.

You can read more about Prof. Singh’s work and accomplishments at his website.

Serina Chang

Assistant Professor of EECS at UC Berkeley

Tania Lombrozo

Professor of Psychology at UC Berkeley

Tania Lombrozo received her Ph.D. from Harvard University and is a Professor of Psychology at UC Berkeley. She will be joining the Department of Psychology at Princeton University in July 2018. Her research aims to address basic questions about learning, reasoning, and decision-making using the empirical tools of experimental psychology and the conceptual tools of analytic philosophy. You can read more about Prof. Lombrozo’s work here or here.

Tom Griffiths

Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science at Princeton

Mark Nitzberg

Executive Director of CHAI

Head of Strategic Outreach for Berkeley AI Research

Martin Fukui

Assistant Director

James Paul (J.P.) Gonzales

Assistant to Stuart Russell

Andrew Critch

Research Scientist

Jonathan Stray

Senior Scientist

Julia Morris

Research Associate

Justin Svegliato

Research Scientist

Livia Morris

Research Associate

Ben Plaut

Research Fellow

Brian Judge

Research Fellow

Cameron Allen

Research Fellow

George Obaido

Research Fellow

Khanh Nguyen

Research Fellow

Michael Cohen

Research Fellow

Paria Rashidinejad

Research Fellow

Caroline Jeanmaire

PhD Student at Oxford University, Public Policy

Director of Strategic Research and Partnerships (2019 - 2021)

Karthika Mohan

Assistant Professor at Oregon State University

Postdoctoral Scholar (2017-2021)

Adam Gleave

Founder at FAR AI

PhD Student in Artificial Intelligence (2017-2023)

Alex Turner

Research Scientist at Google DeepMind on Scalable Alignment Team.

Research Fellow (2022 - 2023)

Cody Wild

Research Software Engineer at Google

Research Engineer (2018-2021)

Dan Hendrycks

Director at the Center for AI Safety

PhD Student, Computer Science (2018-2022)

Daniel Filan

Research Manager at MATS

PhD Student in EECS

Dorsa Sadigh

Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University

PhD Student, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (2012-2017)

Dylan Hadfield-Menell

Assistant Professor at MIT

PhD Student, Computer Science (2013-2020)

Erdem Biyik

Assistant Professor of Computer Science at USC

Erdem is at the department of Computer Science at the University of Southern California as an Assistant Professor. He is a postdoctoral scholar at UC Berkeley mentored by Stuart Russell and Anca Dragan. He has received his B.Sc. degree from Bilkent University, Turkey, in 2017; and Ph.D. degree from Stanford University in 2022 where he was advised by Dorsa Sadigh. His research interests lie in the intersection of robotics, artificial intelligence, machine learning and game theory. He is interested in enabling robots to actively learn from various forms of human feedback and designing robot policies to improve the efficiency of multi-agent systems both in cooperative and competitive settings. He also worked at Google as a research intern in 2021 where he adapted his active robot learning algorithms to recommender systems. He will join the University of Southern California as an assistant professor in 2023.

George Matheos

PhD Student at MIT

Former Undergraduate Student

Jaime Fernandez Fisac

Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at Princeton University

PhD Student, Control, Intelligent Systems and Robotics (2013-2018)

Lawrence Chan

Member of Technical Staff at METR

PhD Student (2023), Advised by Anca Dragan and Stuart Russell

As of January 2023, Lawrence is working at METR (formerly “ARC Evals”), where he conducts evaluations of large language models. Previously, he was at Redwood Research, focusing on adversarial training and neural network interpretability.

He is also pursuing a PhD at UC Berkeley under the supervision of Anca Dragan and Stuart Russell. Before that, he earned a BAS in Computer Science and Logic and a BS in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania’s M&T Program, where he had the opportunity to work with Philip Tetlock on applying machine learning to forecasting.

Lawrence's primary research interests include mechanistic interpretability and scalable oversight. He has also explored conceptual questions related to learning human values.

Additionally, he occasionally blogs about AI alignment and other topics on LessWrong and the AI Alignment Forum.

Michael Dennis

Researcher at Google DeepMind

PhD Student, Artificial Intelligence and Computational Geometry (2016-2023)

Olivia Watkins

Member of Technical Staff at OpenAI

PhD Student (Fall 2019 - Spring 2024)

Rohin Shah

Research Scientist at Google DeepMind

PhD Student, Artificial Intelligence (2014-2020)

Sam Toyer

Member of Technical Staff at OpenAI, Model Safety Team

PhD Student in Artificial Intelligence (2018-2024)

Smitha Milli

Research Scientist at Meta FAIR (NYC) in the AI & Society group

PhD Student, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2017-2022

Steven Wang

Research Engineer (2018-2021)

Thanard Kurutach

AI/ML Research Scientist at Cruise

PhD Student, Computer Science (2016-2020)

Thomas Krendl Gilbert

CEO at Hortus AI

PhD Student, Machine Ethics and Epistemology (2015-2021)

Vael Gates

Head of Community, at FAR AI

PhD Student, Computational Cognitive Science (2016-2021)

Alison Gopnik

Professor of Psychology at UC Berkeley

Affiliate Professor of Philosophy at UC Berkeley

Brandie Nonnecke

Founding Director of the CITRIS Policy Lab

Associate Research Professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy

Brian Christian

Author of The Most Human Human, Algorithms to Live By, and The Alignment Problem

Brian Christian is the author of The Most Human Human, which was named a Wall Street Journal bestseller, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and a New Yorker favorite book of the year. He is the author, with Tom Griffiths, of Algorithms to Live By, a #1 Audible bestseller, Amazon best science book of the year and MIT Technology Review best book of the year.

His third book, The Alignment Problem, was released in October of 2020.

Christian’s writing has been translated into nineteen languages, and has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Wired, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, The Paris Review, and in scientific journals such as Cognitive Science. Christian has been featured on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Radiolab, and The Charlie Rose Show, and has lectured at Google, Facebook, Microsoft, the Santa Fe Institute, and the London School of Economics. His work has won several awards, including fellowships at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, publication in Best American Science & Nature Writing, and an award from the Academy of American Poets.

Born in Wilmington, Delaware, Christian holds degrees in philosophy, computer science, and poetry from Brown University and the University of Washington. A Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, he lives in San Francisco.

Charis Thompson

Chancellor's Professor of Gender & Women's Studies at UC Berkeley

Charis Thompson is Chancellor’s Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies, and a former founding director of the Science, Technology, and Society Center at the University of California, Berkeley; and Professor of Sociology, London School of Economics and Political Science. Her current book in progress, Getting Ahead, focuses on minds, bodies, and emotions in an age of populism and technology elites. Getting Ahead is the third in her book series on technology and democracy. The first, Making Parents (2005), won the Rachel Carson Prize from the Society for the Social Study of Science, and examined gender, race, and agency in relation to reproductive technologies. The second book, Good Science (2013), examined the geopolitics and bioethics of pro-cures innovation economies. Thompson served on the Nuffield Council on Bioethics Working Group on Genome Editing, and currently serves on the World Economic Forum’s Global Technology Council on Technology, Values, and Policy, as well as UC Berkeley’s Stem Cell Research Oversight Committee, and the faculty advisory board of the Center for Race and Gender. She is a recipient of the Social Science Division Distinguished Teaching Award, and in 2017 received an Honorary Doctorate from the Norwegian Science and Technology University.

David Krueger

Assistant Professor at the University of Cambridge

• Reward modeling and reward gaming
• Aligning foundation models
• Understanding learning and generalization in deep learning and foundation models, especially via “empirical theory” approaches
• Preventing the development and deployment of socially harmful AI systems
• Elaborating and evaluating speculative concerns about more advanced future AI systems

Dawn Song

Professor of EECS at UC Berkeley

Dawn Song is a Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at UC Berkeley. Her research interest lies in deep learning and security. She has studied diverse security and privacy issues in computer systems and networks, including areas ranging from software security, networking security, distributed systems security, applied cryptography, blockchain and smart contracts, to the intersection of machine learning and security. She is the recipient of various awards including the MacArthur Fellowship, the Guggenheim Fellowship, the NSF CAREER Award, the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the MIT Technology Review TR-35 Award, the Faculty Research Award from IBM, Google and other major tech companies, and Best Paper Awards from top conferences in Computer Security and Deep Learning. She is a winner of the AMiner Most Influential Scholar Award, as the most cited scholar in Computer Security. She obtained her Ph.D. degree from UC Berkeley. Prior to joining UC Berkeley as a faculty, she was a faculty at Carnegie Mellon University from 2002 to 2007.

You can read more about Prof. Song’s work and accomplishments here.

Demian Pouzo

Associate Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley

Demian Pouzo is an associated professor in the Department of Economics at UC Berkeley. Demian joined the faculty at Berkeley in 2009 as an assistant professor after receiving his PhD in Economics from NYU. He also holds an MA and BA in Economics from Universidad Torcuato Di Tella (Argentina). Pouzo’s research interests include econometrics as well as other fields such as economic theory and macroeconomics.

Gillian Hadfield

Professor of Law and Professor of Strategic Management, University of Toronto

Jacob Steinhardt

Assistant Professor of Statistics at UC Berkeley

Professor Steinhardt’s goal is to make the conceptual advances necessary for machine learning systems to be reliable and aligned with human values. This includes the following directions:

Robustness: How can we build models robust to distributional shift, to adversaries, to model mis-specification, and to approximations imposed by computational constraints? What is the right way to evaluate such models?

Reward specification and reward hacking: Human values are too complex to be specified by hand. How can we infer complex value functions from data? How should an agent make decisions when its value function is approximate due to noise in the data or inadequacies in the model? How can we prevent reward hacking–degenerate policies that exploit differences between the inferred and true reward?

Scalable alignment: Modern ML systems are often too large, and deployed too broadly, for any single person to reason about in detail, posing challenges to both design and monitoring. How can we design ML systems that conform to interpretable abstractions? How do we enable meaningful human oversight at training and deployment time despite the large scale? How will these large-scale systems affect societal equilibria?

These challenges require rethinking both the theoretical and empirical paradigms of ML. Theories of statistical generalization do not account for the extreme types of generalization considered above, and decision theory does not account for cases where the reward function is only approximate. Meanwhile, measuring empirical test accuracy on a fixed distribution is insufficient to analyze phenomena such as robustness to distributional shift.

For more information about Professor Steinhardt, please visit: https://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~jsteinhardt/

Jakob Foerster

Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Toronto and the Vector Institute

John Zysman

Professor Emeritus in Political Science at UC Berkeley

John Zysman is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Political Science. He received his B.A. from Harvard University and his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has written extensively on European and Japanese political economy, policy and corporate strategy.

His most recent articles include:

The Next Phase in the Digital Revolution: Abundant Computing, Platforms, Growth and Employment in February 2018 CACM
Intelligent Tools and Digital Platforms: Implications for Work and Employment in Intereconomics Review of European Economic Policy (Issue 6 2017)
The Rise of the Platform Economy In NAS Issues in Science and Technoogy, Spring 2016
Entrepreneurial Finance in the Era of Intelligent Tools and Digital Platforms: Implications and Consequences for Work

Recent books include:

The Third Globalization: Can Wealthy Countries Stay Rich Ed. with Dan Brezniz (Oxford University Press 2013)
Can Green Sustain Growth: From the Religion to the Reality To Sustainable Prosperity Ed. with Mark Huberty (Stanford Unversity Press. 2013)

Earlier books include:

The Highest Stakes: The Economic Foundations of the Next Security System (Oxford University Press, 1992)
Manufacturing Matters: The Myth of the Post-Industrial Economy (Basic Books, 1987)
Governments, Markets, and Growth: Finance and the Politics of Industrial Change (Cornell University Press, 1983)

Juliana Schroeder

Assistant Professor of Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley

Juliana Schroeder researches how people navigate their social worlds: first, how people form inferences about others’ mental states and mental capacities and, second, how these inferences influence their interactions.

Juliana’s research has been published in journals such as Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Journal of Experimental Psychology, and Psychological Science. It has been featured by outlets such as the New York Times, Newsweek, NBC, and the Today Show, and has been funded by the National Science Foundation.

Juliana received her B.A. in psychology and economics from The University of Virginia. She received a M.A. in social psychology and advanced methods from the University of Chicago, and an M.B.A. from The Chicago Booth School of Business. Her Ph.D. is in Psychology and Business from the University of Chicago. Juliana is currently an Assistant Professor at the Berkeley Haas School of Business.

You can read more about Prof. Schroeder’s work and accomplishments here.

Ken Goldberg

Professor and Chair of the Industrial Engineering and Operations Research Department at UC Berkeley

Ken Goldberg is an artist, inventor, and UC Berkeley Professor focusing on robotics. He was appointed the William S. Floyd Jr Distinguished Chair in Engineering and serves as Chair of the Industrial Engineering and Operations Research Department. He has secondary appointments in EECS, Art Practice, the School of Information, and Radiation Oncology at the UCSF Medical School. Ken is Director of the CITRIS “People and Robots” Initiative and the UC Berkeley AUTOLAB where he and his students pursue research in machine learning for robotics and automation in warehouses, homes, and operating rooms. Ken developed the first provably complete algorithms for part feeding and part fixturing and the first robot on the Internet. Despite agonizingly slow progress, he persists in trying to make robots less clumsy. He has over 250 peer-reviewed publications and 8 U.S. Patents. He co-founded and served as Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering. Ken’s artwork has appeared in 70 exhibits including the Whitney Biennial and films he has co-written have been selected for Sundance and nominated for an Emmy Award. Ken was awarded the NSF PECASE (Presidential Faculty Fellowship) from President Bill Clinton in 1995, elected IEEE Fellow in 2005 and selected by the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society for the George Saridis Leadership Award in 2016. He lives in the Bay Area and is madly in love with his wife, filmmaker and Webby Awards founder Tiffany Shlain, and their two daughters.

You can read more about Prof. Goldberg’s work and accomplishments here.

Lara Buchak

Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University

Mariano Florentino Cuéllar

Chair, Board of the Directors at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences

Marion Fourcade

Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley

Marion Fourcade received her PhD from Harvard University (2000) and taught at New York University and Princeton University before joining the Berkeley sociology department in 2003. A comparative sociologist by training and taste, she is interested in variations in economic and political knowledge and practice across nations. Her first book, Economists and Societies (Princeton University Press 2009), explored the distinctive character of the discipline and profession of economics in three countries. A second book, The Ordinal Society (with Kieran Healy), is under contract. This book investigates new forms of social stratification and morality in the digital economy. Other recent research focuses on the valuation of nature in comparative perspective; the moral regulation of states; the comparative study of political organization (with Evan Schofer and Brian Lande); the microsociology of courtroom exchanges (with Roi Livne); the sociology of economics, with Etienne Ollion and Yann Algan, and with Rakesh Khurana; the politics of wine classifications in France and the United States (with Rebecca Elliott and Olivier Jacquet). A final book-length project, Measure for Measure: Social Ontologies of Classification, will examine the cultural and institutional logic of what we may call “national classificatory styles” across a range of empirical domains.

Fourcade is also an Associate Fellow of the Max Planck-Sciences Po Center on Coping with Instability in Market Societies (Maxpo), and a past President of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (2016).

You can read more about Prof. Fourcade’s work and accomplishments here.

Michael Littman

Professor of Computer Science at Brown University

Michael Lederman Littman works mainly in reinforcement learning, but has done work in machine learning, game theory, computer networking, partially observable Markov decision process solving, computer solving of analogy problems and other areas. He is currently a professor of computer science at Brown University.

Before graduate school, Michael worked with Thomas Landauer at Bellcore and was granted a patent for one of the earliest systems for Cross-language information retrieval. Michael received his Ph.D. in computer science from Brown University in 1996. From 1996 to 1999, he was a professor at Duke University. During his time at Duke, he worked on an automated crossword solver PROVERB, which won an Outstanding Paper Award in 1999 from AAAI and competed in the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. From 2000 to 2002, he worked at AT&T. From 2002 to 2012, he was a professor at Rutgers University; he chaired the department from 2009-12. In Summer 2012 he returned to Brown University as a full professor.

Moritz Hardt

Assistant Professor of EECS at UC Berkeley

Nika Haghtalab

Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University

Niko Kolodny

Professor of Philosophy at UC Berkeley

Niko Kolodny is Professor of Philosophy at UC Berkeley. He works in moral and political philosophy. He has written on the ethical significance of personal relationships and the nature of rationality, especially instrumental rationality. More recent papers focus on the value of democracy, the justification of the state, and the future of humanity. He has designed a new course for both philosophy and data science majors, “Moral Questions of Data Science,” which explores, among other things, the implications of replacing human judgment in social decision-making with statistical inference and automated algorithms.

Owain Evans

Research Lead (new AI Safety group in Berkeley)
Research Associate, Oxford University

Rediet Abebe

Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley

Rosie Campbell

Technical Program Manager at OpenAI

Scott Emmons

Research Scientist at Google DeepMind

Siddharth Srivastava

Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Arizona State University

Siddharth Srivastava is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering at Arizona State University. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Previously, Prof. Srivastava was a Staff Scientist at the United Technologies Research Center in Berkeley. Prior to that, he was a postdoctoral researcher in the RUGS group at the University of California Berkeley. His research objective is to develop intelligent robots and software agents that assist humans in their daily lives. Towards this objective, his research focuses on developing formal frameworks, algorithms and implementations that allow autonomous agents to reason and act efficiently under uncertainty. His dissertation work received a Best Paper award at the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS) and an Outstanding Dissertation award from the Department of Computer Science at UMass Amherst.

You can read more about Prof. Srivastava’s work and accomplishments at his website.

Tom Lenaerts

Professor at the Université Libre de Bruxelles

Vincent Corruble

Associate Professor at Sorbonne Université

Vincent Corruble received degrees in Engineering (Ecole Centrale de Lille, France), a M.S. in Systems Engineering (University of Virginia, 1992), a Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence (UPMC, Paris 6, 1996). After postdocs in South Africa, in the US, and in the UK, he joined the faculty of UPMC (now Sorbonne Université), LIP6 laboratory.

He has contributed to the field of Machine Learning and Pattern Recognition, Machine discovery and Data Science, with applications to history of medicine and medical research. In the early 2000’s, he turned his attention to intelligent agents, especially learning agents and multi-agent systems, with a special interest for multi-agent reinforcement learning in complex systems. This found significant applications in the area of Game AI and later in city modeling and urban simulation. This also led to a focus on virtual characters and agent architectures, with emphasis on affective computing to model emotions and their interplay with personality and social interactions.

Lately Vincent Corruble has developed interest in AI safety, and more specifically on how agents and humans can develop safe cooperation and trust over time. In this context he visited CHAI during the summer of 2019. He has been member of the Multi-Agent Systems group at LIP6 (Sorbonne Université, Paris) since 2007.

Wesley Holliday

Professor of Philosophy at UC Berkeley

Aly Lidayan

PhD Student, Fall 2020 - Present

Anand Siththaranjan

PhD Student, Fall 2021 - Present

Arnaud Fickinger

PhD Student, Fall 2019 - Present

Bhaskar Mishra

PhD Student, Fall 2023 - Present

Cassidy Laidlaw

PhD Student, Fall 2020 - Present

Erik Jenner

PhD Student, Fall 2022 - Present

Hanlin Zhu

PhD Student, Fall 2021 - Present

Jakub Grudzien Kuba

PhD Student, Fall 2022 - Present

Jessy Lin

PhD Student, Fall 2020 - Present

Jessy Lin is a PhD student at Berkeley AI Research. She is interested in building machine learning systems that work well in the dynamic, interactive settings of the real world.

Jessy graduated with a double-major in computer science / electrical engineering and philosophy from MIT. Previously Jessy worked on human-inspired AI with the Computational Cognitive Science Group and on human-in-the-loop machine translation at Lilt. At MIT she organized many seasons of HackMIT with the hackathon community. Jessy also spent a summer with the Natural Language Understanding group at Google Research NY, advised by David Weiss. Learn more at her website.

Jiahai Feng

PhD Student, Fall 2023 - Present

Johannes Treutlein

PhD Student, Fall 2022 - Present

Julian Yocum

PhD Student, Fall 2024 - Present

Mark Bedaywi

PhD Student, Fall 2024 - Present

Micah Carroll

PhD Student, Fall 2020 - Present

Michelle Li

PhD Student, Fall 2024 - Present

Niklas Lauffer

PhD Student, Fall 2021 - Present

Rachel Freedman

PhD Student, Fall 2019 - Present

Shreyas Kapur

PhD Student, Fall 2022 - Present

Shreyas is a PhD student at Berkeley AI. He is interested in developing algorithms that can learn to construct rich, interpretable models of the world as quickly and robustly as humans do.

Shreyas got his undergraduate and Master's degrees at MIT, where he was part of the Computational Cognitive Science Group advised by Prof. Josh Tenenbaum, working on neurosymbolic techniques for building structured world models.

During his time as an undergrad, he spent summers at DeepMind, Waymo, and worked on research projects under Prof. Pattie Maes at the Fluid Interfaces Group. He also helped organize HackMIT.

Shreyas's Webpage

Tu (Alina) Trinh

Master's Student

Yuxi Liu

PhD Student, Fall 2020 - Present

Yuxi Liu is a PhD student with interests in mathematics, theoretical physics, philosophy, and AI. Before coming to Berkeley, Yuxi graduated from Australian National University with degrees in mathematics and theoretical physics. Learn more at yuxiliu1995.github.io.

Jacy Reese Anthris

PhD Student, Sociology and Statistics, University of Chicago

Pulkit Verma

Postdoctoral Associate in the Interactive Robotics Group at CSAIL and AeroAstro, MIT

Pulkit is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Interactive Robotics Group at CSAIL and AeroAstro, MIT, working with Prof. Julie Shah. He completed his Ph.D. at the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence at Arizona State University, advised by Prof. Siddharth Srivastava. During his Ph.D., he was also affiliated with UC Berkeley’s Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence and ASU’s Center for Human, Artificial Intelligence, and Robot Teaming. He earned his M.Tech. from the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at IIT Guwahati, where he was advised by Prof. Pradip K. Das.

Pulkit's primary interests lie in AI safety, AI planning, action-model learning, interpretability, and the analysis of abstractions. His research focuses on ensuring the safe and reliable behavior of AI agents. Currently, he is investigating the minimal set of requirements an AI system needs to enable users to assess and understand the limits of its safe operability.

In the past, he has worked in the areas of bio-inspired robotics, speech processing, and the Internet of Things.

Dillon Sandhu

Intern

Alexandra Souly

Intern

Andrew Garber

Intern

Austin Tripp

Intern

Aymane El Gadarri

Intern

Jonathan Colaço Carr

Intern

Juan Liévano

Intern

Martín Soto

Intern

Mohamad H. Danesh

Intern

Pavel Czempin

Intern

Sana Pandey

Intern

Sandy Tanwisuth

Intern

At CHAI, Sandy will be working with Niklas Lauffer on Representation Learning for Effective Coordination. Learn more on Sandy's personal website.

Zeno Marquis

Intern

Alex Turner

Former Intern

Alexis Wan

Former Interns

Antoni Lorente Martinez

Former Intern

Beth Barnes

Former Intern

Carlo Attubato

Former Intern

Charlie Griffin

Former Intern

Charlotte Roman

Former Intern

Charlotte is a PhD student at the University of Warwick at the center for Mathematics for Real-world Systems. In her PhD research, she uses game theory to study how people respond to intelligent traffic systems such as route planning apps and traffic lights. She is also interested in cooperative multiagent reinforcement learning. At CHAI, Charlotte is working on finding safe beliefs that encourage cooperation in sequential social dilemmas. Her broad interests include AI safety, fairness, and bounded rationality.

Chris Cundy

Former Intern

Cynthia Chen

Former Intern

Davis Foote

Former Intern

David Lindner

Former Intern

David is a masters student at ETH Zurich working on reinforcement learning. Broadly, his research is concerned with building reliable intelligent systems that interact with the world. Recently he has been interested in learning robust reward functions from human feedback and ways to reason about the uncertainty an RL agent has about its reward function. At CHAI, David is working with Rohin Shah on inferring human preferences from the current state of the world in complex environments. In the past, he has done work in condensed matter physics, network optimization, computational social science and bias in machine learning. His website is davidlindner.me.

Dmitrii Krasheninnikov

Former Intern

Dmitrii is a second-year masters student at the University of Amsterdam, where he studies artificial intelligence. At CHAI, Dmitrii investigates ways to combine misspecified and conflicting reward functions obtained via different specification processes (e.g. hand-specification and inverse reinforcement learning). This is Dmitrii’s third time working at CHAI. Previously he worked with Rohin Shah on an algorithm that can learn human preferences from the current state of the world, and studied properties of the maximum causal entropy inverse RL algorithm with Andrew Critch.

Before CHAI Dmitrii worked on stability of deep learning algorithms as an intern at a small startup in Finland, and designed efficient algorithms for processing next-generation sequencing data at the Bioinformatics Institute in Russia.

You can learn more about Dmitrii at his personal website.

Dylan Cope

Former Intern

Edmund Mills

Former Intern

Eric Michaud

Former Intern

Eric is a fourth-year undergraduate at UC Berkeley studying mathematics. He is broadly interested in understanding why deep learning works so well, and in investigating the general principles that give rise to intelligence in physical systems.

As a CHAI intern, Eric is working with Adam Gleave to develop interpretability techniques for reward functions. He hopes that this work will help to detect when learned reward functions fail to reflect human preferences, without having to train a policy and without knowing a ground-truth reward.

Before working at CHAI, Eric interned with the Berkeley SETI Research Center and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. You can learn more about him at his personal website.

Erik Jenner

Former Intern

Ethan Mendes

Former Intern

Euan Ong

Former Intern

Euan Ong is a final-year undergraduate at the University of Cambridge, studying Computer Science. His ambition is to develop powerful, yet safe and interpretable abstract reasoners, whose internal state and behaviour remain transparent to the end user. To this end, he is particularly interested in exploring how the mathematical tool-kits we use to understand and structure programs ‒ such as formal methods, types and category theory ‒ can inspire new ways to both reverse-engineer existing neural networks, and build scalable neurosymbolic systems. You can read more about his research on his website.

Harry Giles

Former Intern

Harry is masters graduate in mathematics from Cambridge, UK. He is interested in statistics, and has experience working in finance. In particular, he is interested in reinforcement learning, and other topics of decision making under uncertainty and/or Constraints.

At CHAI, Harry has been working with Lawrence Chan on models for suboptimal RL policies, in particular Boltzmann rationality, for which he has also been working on the IRL problem. You can contact him through his website.

Henry Papadatos

Former Intern

Jess Reidel

Former Intern

Joar Skalse

Former Intern

Joe Benton

Former Intern

Johannes Treutlein

Former Intern

Johannes is an incoming MSc student in computer science at the University of Toronto. Previously, he studied mathematics and computer science at the Technical University of Berlin and the University of Oxford. His research interests include multi-agent learning, game theory, bargaining and decision theory. At CHAI, he is working with Jakob Foerster and Michael Dennis on whether and how cheap talk can help with zero-shot coordination in cooperative multi-agent RL. Before that, Johannes was a research assistant at the machine learning lab at his university. His website is johannestreutlein.com.

Julian Yocum

Former Intern

Jun Shern Chan

Former Intern

Qingyuan Lu

Former Intern

Lauro Langosco di Langosco

Former Intern

Leon Lang

Former Intern

Lev McKinney

Former Intern

Lukas Berglund

Former Intern

Luke Bailey

Former Intern

Luke Bailey is a rising senior at Harvard College pursuing a bachelor's degree in computer science and mathematics and a masters degree in computer science. He is currently conducting research on continual learning at the Harvard Data to Actionable Knowledge lab and is a member of the Harvard AI Safety Team. This summer he will be working with Scott Emmons on developing adversarial attacks to vision-language models.

Mason Nakamura

Former Intern

Matthew Farrugia-Roberts

Former Intern

Matthew Rahtz

Former Intern

Max Kaufmann

Former Intern

Michael Chen

Former Interns

Michael McDonald

Former Intern

Michael completed his undergraduate studies at UC Berkeley with a double major in computer science and applied mathematics. Broadly, his interests cover value alignment in multi-step/multi-objective task scenarios and how robots can learn to efficiently aid humans in such scenarios.

As an undergraduate student, Michael researched under Professor Pieter Abbeel with Dylan Hadfield-Menell on task and motion planning algorithms - initially for a laundry-robot exhibit for the Victoria and Albert Museum in London meant to examine the feasibility and challenges of integrating robotic agents into everyday life. That work then served as foundation for designing imitation-learning algorithms for accomplishing multi-objective plans with normally intractable cost functions.

This coming autumn Michael will begin his master’s here at Berkeley in the EECS 5th year M.S. program, advised by Professor Anca Dragan.

Michał Mgeładze-Arciuch

Former Intern

Nathan Miller

Former Intern

Neel Alex

Former Intern

Neel Nanda

Former Intern

Nitish Dashora

Former Intern

Oliver Daniels-Koch

Former Intern

Oliver Richardson

Former Intern

Pavel Czempin

Former Intern

Pedro Freire

Former Intern

Pedro is a M.Sc. student in Mathematics and Computer Science at Ecole Polytechnique, France. Some of his AI interests include (i) how to make agents better at processing higher-level feedback from humans, and (ii) the development of tools for RL interpretability - in particular to better understand how we can reduce variance and increase sample-efficiency in learning, and have agents with better guarantees of generalization.Other of his interests include interactive theorem proving, software tooling, game development, virtual reality, and human-computer interaction more broadly.

Previously, he worked at Google developing tools for monitoring and performing statistical analysis on the behavior of YouTube video classifiers, and worked at Facebook on the development of Augmented Reality software. He is currently working on benchmarks specialized in evaluating properties of Inverse Reinforcement Learning algorithms.

Rafael Albert

Former Intern

Sergei Volodin

Former Intern

Sergei is a Master student at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) studying Computer Science and Neuroscience. Sergei did an internship at Google which resulted in a paper on causal models in reinforcement learning. Sergei co-founded the local AI safety group in Lausanne which does research and discussions. At CHAI, Sergei is working on adversarial policies with Adam Gleave.

Shivam Singhal

Former Intern

Shlomi Hod

Former Intern

Shlomi is a data scientist and educator. He works on developing knowledge, practices, and tools to audit and mitigate the biases of real-world AI systems. He is the developer of Responsibly an open-source toolkit that brings techniques from AI bias and fairness research to practitioners. In CHAI, Shlomi works on developing a new method for increasing the interpretability of neural networks under the supervision of Daniel Filan. Besides that, Shlomi teaches various computing classes on Python programming and machine learning. His focus is on teaching a methodical and thoughtful process of programming problem-solving. He is one of the co-founders of the Israeli Cyber Education Center, where he led the design of national computing programs for kids and teenagers. For example, he initiated and managed the development of the cybersecurity Bagrut (the Israeli matriculation exam, the equivalent of A-level), and co-authored a Computer Network textbook in tutorial approach in Hebrew Before that, Shlomi worked as an algorithmic researcher and a research team leader in cybersecurity. He holds a B.Sc.. in pure Mathematics from Bar-Ilan University. Currently, he studies for an M.Sc. in Cognitive Systems at the University of Potsdam in Germany. In January 2020, Shlomi will start a Ph.D. in Computer Science in Boston Univesity.

Sören Mindermann

Former Intern

Stephen Casper

Former Intern

Stephen Casper is a rising senior at Harvard College pursuing a degree in statistics and a minor in mathematics. In addition to interning at CHAI under Daniel Filan, he is affiliated with the MIT/Harvard Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines and the Harvard Kreiman Lab. Broadly, his research interests align with the goals of making AI systems safe and aligned. More specifically, areas that he is interested in include understanding compressible features and generalization in deep networks, robust reinforcement learning, and decision theory.

Stephen’s work with CHAI is focusing on mechanistic transparency via modular interpretations of neural networks. However, he is also thinking about adversaries in contexts of deep reinforcement learning and decision theory.

In addition to being fascinated by questions in machine intelligence, Stephen’s primary motivations for working on AI alignment involve using it as a strategy for shaping the future impactfully for the better. He is excited about the Effective Altruism community and the paradigm of maximizing the good that one can do in the world.

For more information and contact info, please see his website.

Thomas Woodside

Former Intern

Yawen Duan

Former Intern

Yijin Hua

Former Intern

Yulong Lin

Former Intern