AI Safety Israel Conference
Meet the Speakers
| Prof. Yoav Shoham
Professor emeritus of computer science at Stanford University Co-Founder, AI21 Labs
A leading AI expert, Prof. Shoham is Fellow of AAAI, ACM and the Game Theory Society. Among his awards are the IJCAI Research Excellence Award, the AAAI/ACM Allen Newell Award, and the ACM/SIGAI Autonomous Agents Research Award. His online Game Theory course has been watched by close to a million people. Prof. Shoham has founded several AI companies, including TradingDynamics (acquired by Ariba), Katango and Timeful (both acquired by Google), and AI21 Labs. Prof. Shoham also chairs the AI Index initiative (www.AIindex.org), which tracks global AI activity and progress, and WeCode (www.wecode.org.il), a nonprofit initiative to train high-quality programmers from disadvantaged populations.
| Dr. Stuart Armstrong
Co-Founder and Chief Researcher, Aligned AI
Stuart Armstrong is a researcher focusing on the safety and possibilities of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and how to define the potential goals of AI and map humanity’s partially defined values into it. Dr. Armstrong has been working on AI risks for over a decade, first at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, then at the Future of Humanity Institute (FHI). He has written about and pioneered many key concepts in AI alignment, including interruptibility, low-impact AIs, counterfactual Oracle AIs, the difficulty/impossibility of learning human preferences without assumptions, and how to nevertheless learn these preferences. In the past few years, he has been working to formalize AI desiderata in general models so that AI designers can include these safety methods in their designs, including his collaboration with DeepMind on “Interruptibility” He recently left FHI to co-found Aligned AI, an Oxford based startup focused on applying his alignment research to ML systems.
| Prof. Stuart Russell
Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley
Holder of the Smith-Zadeh Chair in Engineering, and Director of the Center for Human-Compatible AI and the Kavli Center for Ethics, Science, and the Public. He is a recipient of the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award and Research Excellence Award and held the Chaire Blaise Pascal in Paris. In 2021 he received the OBE from Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth and gave the Reith Lectures. He is an Honorary Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, an Andrew Carnegie Fellow, and 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, used in 1500 universities in 135 countries. His research covers a wide range of topics in artificial intelligence, with a current emphasis on the long-term future of artificial intelligence and its relation to humanity. He has developed a new global seismic monitoring system for the nuclear-test-ban treaty and is currently working to ban lethal autonomous weapons
