Stuart Russell -- 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, holder of the
Smith-Zadeh Chair in Engineering, 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 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. 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).