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Stuart Russell
Professor UC Berkeley
| Center for Human-Compatible AI
61 YEARS YOUNG
Stuart Russell is an accomplished academic who received his B.A. with first-class honors in physics from Oxford University in 1982 and subsequently earned his Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford in 1986. He is an Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Professor at the University of California at Berkeley. He holds the Smith-Zadeh Engineering Chair and is the Center for Human-Compatible AI Director. He has previously served as an Adjunct Professor of Neurological Surgery at UC San Francisco and Vice-Chair of the World Economic Forum's Council on AI and Robotics.
Russell has received numerous prestigious awards, including the Presidential Young Investigator Award of the National Science Foundation, the IJCAI Computers, and Thought Award, and the Feigenbaum Prize of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. He also received the World Technology Award in the Policy category, the IJCAI Research Excellence Award, and the Mitchell Prize of the American Statistical Association. He has also been recognized for his contributions to education with Outstanding Educator Awards from ACM and AAAI.
Russell's research interests span a broad range of topics in artificial intelligence, including machine learning, probabilistic reasoning, knowledge representation, planning, real-time decision-making, multitarget tracking, computer vision, and computational physiology. His book, "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach" (co-authored with Peter Norvig), is widely considered the standard text in AI and has been translated into 14 languages. It is used in 1500 universities across 135 countries.
Aside from his academic work, Russell has collaborated with the United Nations to develop a global seismic monitoring system for the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. He is also a vocal advocate for ethical considerations in the development of artificial intelligence. His most recent book, "Human Compatible: AI and the Problem of Control" (Viking/Penguin, 2019), explores the long-term future of AI and its implications for humanity.
Russell's impressive accomplishments have earned him numerous accolades and honors, including being appointed by Her Majesty The Queen as an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2021 and being selected as a Reith Lecturer. He is also an Honorary Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, a Distinguished Fellow of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, an Associate Fellow of the Royal Institute for International Affairs (Chatham House), and a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.