Stuart J. Russell


Stuart Jonathan Russell is a computer scientist known for his contributions to artificial intelligence. He is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley and Adjunct Professor of Neurological Surgery at the University of California, San Francisco. He holds the Smith-Zadeh Chair in Engineering at University of California, Berkeley. He founded and leads the Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence at UC Berkeley. Russell is the co-author of the most popular textbook in the field of artificial intelligence: used in more than 1,400 universities in 128 countries.

Education and early life

Stuart Russell was born in Portsmouth, England. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree with first-class honours in Physics from the University of Oxford where he was an undergraduate student at Wadham College, Oxford in 1982. He moved to the United States where he completed his PhD in Computer Science at Stanford University in 1986 for research on inductive reasoning and analogical reasoning supervised by Michael Genesereth.

Career and research

After his PhD, he joined the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, where since 1996 he is Professor of Computer Science. He also holds an appointment as Adjunct Professor of Neurological Surgery at the University of California, San Francisco, where he pursues research in computational physiology and intensive-care unit monitoring. He is also a fellow at Wadham College, Oxford.
His research on the history and future of Artificial Intelligence and its relation to humanity includes machine learning, probabilistic reasoning, knowledge representation, planning, real-time decision making, multitarget tracking, computer vision, inverse reinforcement learning, and the movement to ban the manufacture and use of autonomous weapons.
In 2016, he founded the Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence at UC Berkeley, with co-principal investigators Pieter Abbeel, Anca Dragan, Tom Griffiths, Bart Selman, Joseph Halpern, Michael Wellman and Satinder Singh Baveja. Russell is the author of many journal articles as well as several books, including The Use of Knowledge in Analogy and Induction and co-author of Do the Right Thing: Studies in Limited Rationality. Along with Peter Norvig, he is the author of ', a textbook used by over 1,400 universities in 116 countries. He is on the Scientific Advisory Board for the Future of Life Institute and the Advisory Board of the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk.
In 2017, he collaborated with the Future of Life Institute to produce a video, Slaughterbots, about swarms of drones assassinating political opponents, and presented this to a United Nations meeting about the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons.
In 2018 he contributed an interview to the documentary Do You Trust This Computer?
His book, ', was published by Viking on 8 October 2019.

Awards and honors

Stuart Russell was co-winner, in 1995, of the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award at the International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence, the premier international award in artificial intelligence for researchers under 35. In 2003 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and in 2011 he was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2005 he was awarded the ACM Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award. In 2012, he was appointed to the Blaise Pascal Chair in Paris, awarded to "internationally acclaimed foreign scientists in all disciplines," as well as the senior Chaire d'excellence of France's Agence Nationale de la Recherche.
Russell is Vice Chair of the World Economic Forum's Council on AI and Robotics. He is also a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. Other awards include the National Science Foundation's Presidential Young Investigator Award, the World Technology Award, the Mitchell Prize and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Outstanding Educator Award.