Stuart Russell

Stuart Jonathan Russell is a British computer scientist who contributed to artificial intelligence (AI). He is a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, and was 2008 to 2011 an adjunct professor of neurological surgery at the University of California, San Francisco. He holds the Smith-Zadeh Chair in Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. He founded and led the Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence (CHAI) at UC Berkeley. 

Russell is the co-author with Peter Norvig of the most popular textbook in the field of AI: Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, used in more than 1,500 universities in 135 countries. Russell was born in Portsmouth, England. He attended St Paul's School in London, where he was 1st scholar. He studied physics at Wadham College, Oxford, and was awarded his Bachelor of Arts degree with first-class honors in 1982. 

He moved to the United States to complete his Ph.D. in computer science at Stanford University in 1986 for research on inductive reasoning and analogical reasoning, supervised by Michael Genesereth. A NATO studentship from the UK Science and Engineering Research Council supported his Ph.D. After his 1986 Ph.D., he joined the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley as a professor of computer science. From 2008 to 2011, he also held an appointment as an adjunct professor of Neurological Surgery at the University of California, San Francisco. 

He pursued research in computational physiology and intensive-care unit monitoring. He is also an Honorary Fellow at Wadham College, Oxford. His research in the area of Artificial Intelligence (AI) includes contributions to machine learning, probabilistic reasoning, knowledge representation, planning, real-time decision making, multitarget tracking, computer vision, and inverse reinforcement learning. He has also actively participated in 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 has published several hundred conferences and journal articles as well as several books, including The Use of Knowledge in Analogy and Induction and Do the Right Thing: Studies in Limited Rationality (with Eric Wefald).

Along with Peter Norvig, he is the author of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, a textbook used by over 1,500 universities in 135 countries. He is on the Scientific Advisory Board for the Future of Life Institute and the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk advisory board. 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, Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control, was published by Viking on 8 October 2019. His work is aligned with Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence themes. His former doctoral students include Marie desJardins, Eric Xing and Shlomo Zilberstein. Russell gave the 2021 Reith Lectures, broadcast on BBC Radio 4, on Living with Artificial Intelligence with lectures on "The Biggest Event in Human History," "AI in warfare," "AI in the economy," and "AI: A Future for Humans."